[OSM-talk] contact: tags

[Richard Z.]

On Tue, May 05, 2015 at 06:20:42PM +0200, Martin Koppenhoefer wrote:
> 2015-05-05 17:21 GMT+02:00 Richard Z. <ricoz.osm at gmail.com>:
> 
> > the verbosity may be unneeded for very simple things like phone
> > but is that true for everything covered by "contact*" ?
> > key:fax? key:twitter? key:vhf?
> >
> 
> 
> have you seen taginfo?
> 906 vhf
> 182 vhf_channel
> 73 waterway:vhf_channel
> 36 lock:VHF_channel
> 32 VHF
> 16 contact:vhf

imho key:vhf is pretty poor choice of a tag name and the usage count 
is overall not so large.

> http://taginfo.osm.org/search?q=vhf
> 
> twitter and fax are less clear, but the "contact:"-form is always less in
> use.

still sceptical. If someone wants to write an app displaying contact info
he could blindly output "contact:.*" or put together a list of many dozens 
of tags like phone,fax,email,facebook,vk,xing and still won't be able to 
retrieve contact of a site that has more exotic means of communication like 
smoke signals or drums.
Even collecting all the existing tags looks like a huge pain in the b..t
if they are not documented or prefixed by "contact:".

The usage of the four most popular "contact:" entries reaches almost
200,000 which is not too bad.

Also I am not quite sure how many of those entries are actually valid, taginfo
is not a great help here:

http://taginfo.osm.org/keys/phone#values
http://taginfo.osm.org/keys/contact:phone#values

Btw anyone knows what phone=3631 is ?

Richard