[OSM-talk] Resolving OSM tags to URLs

Rob Nickerson rob.j.nickerson at gmail.com
Tue Apr 1 20:12:46 UTC 2014


-- Andy Mabbett wrote: --

I gave the requested talk yesterday.

During preparatory discussions, it turned out that, while hosted by
IBM, the audience was a W3C working group, "Data on the web best
practice".  As such, the interest was no so much trees or gas pipes,
but the use of URIs (particularly linked data URIs)  in OSM.

Using trees and other examples, I described, and we then discussed,
how we tag entities in OSM, using UIDs but not necessarily URLs, and
issues facing data users who need to resolve those UIDs back to URLs;
for example:

    openplaques_plaque = 1536

to:

   http://openplaques.org/plaques/1536

To that end, I've just modified [[Template:KeyDescription]] by adding
two parameters:

   https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Tag:historic%3Dmemorial&diff=prev&oldid=1010411

for "website" and "url_pattern"; see:

   https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:openplaques_plaque

of an example of how they're intended to be used (the label display
needs tweaking).

Other issues which are unhelpful to data re-users include keys with
missing documentation; redundant keys ("Key:openplaques_plaque" vs
"Key:openplaques_id"); ambiguous keys ("ref=1234" - ref in whose
database?) and the perennial problem of the lack of stable URIs for
entities in OSM. I have yet to solve that one...

-- End Quote --

Hi Andy,

I gather that you will be proving some more feedback to the local OSM group
(mappa mercia) this Thursday. I look forward to hearing more. In regards to
your change to the wiki template - I think this is a great first step and
will look at adding  this to some more tags. For example, the Listed
Buildings in England (the tag EH_ref seems to be used).

Regards,
Rob
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