[OSM-talk] Applicability of wiki tagging and votes: may, should or must

[Mateusz Konieczny]

On Thu, 28 Jan 2016 21:09:42 +0000
Chris Hill <osm at raggedred.net> wrote:

> This diversity of tagging is often quoted as a problem for data 
> consumers. Oddly, this is often by people who don't actually use the 
> data but feel it must be awkward. Actually it's not. All OSM data has
> to processed before use. This processing can be fairly
> straightforward or really complex, but that's not much to do with
> tagging diversity. Whatever the processing is (LUA code, SQL code or
> any other coding) it only has to written once and can be used over
> and over again.

"but that's not much to do with tagging diversity" - I would dispute
it, from my personal experience. Tagging diversity IS one of real
problems in using OSM data.

Certainly it is not the biggest one, but multiple evolving tagging
schemes are a serious problem.