2009/8/10 Tom Chance <t...@acrewoods.net>: > It's important for OpenStreetMap to have some coherence. > > It's quite important that you and I both agree that "chair" refers to a > piece of furniture on which we sit. Imagine if you used the word "chair" to > refer to a small furry pet that meows and likes fish! We can't have a > situation where - as others have pointed out - we have people using a > particular tag in many different ways.
Agreed. The problem with path (the one I call a problem, too) is IMHO that there are people who don't like this tagging scheme or think it's unneccessary (which is not a problem for me), but instead of just not using it and staying with footway/cycleway/bridleway, they think "well, but its there and gets rendered, lets use it for something else (e.g. "very narrow way in the forest") and change the wiki page". *zap* - a small furry pet that meows and likes fish. ;-) > It also helps if we stick to one way of describing any particular thing. > It's lovely that in England we have "cow shed" and "byre" and many other > phrases for the same object. But when you're writing a stylesheet for > Mapnik, or trying to download an extract, or writing a routing algorithm, > your task is made ten times more difficult if you have to keep adding lots > of alternative ways of describing the same thing. Yes, it helps, but it's IMHO better to come up with a new way to describe something rather than changing the meaning of long-existing, widely used and important tags... > We don't need to force anybody to do anything, but here are some basic ways > in we can encourage a more coherent approach: > > - discussions at SOTM or regional meetings > - a well managed wiki (hah!) > - stylesheets for Mapnik and ti...@home (both a bit out of hand, as Andy > Allan says) > - presets in Potlatch and JOSM > - error checking tools > - even bots that try to correct very minor errors like s/cahtolic/catholic/ Okay, no problem with that, as long as alternative ways of tagging like highway=path are not treated as errors. > I would support removing highway=path from Potlatch and JOSM and the Mapnik > stylesheet until a wiki page is drawn up which unambiguously describes how > it should be used. If it duplicates or replaces existing tags, that should > be properly resolved. That would be at least one step too far in my eyes. But a better wiki page would be great. > There's a big difference, Simon. Nobody had yet accepted any addressing > schema, none of the community mechanisms I listed above properly supported > any one approach, until the breakthrough. Now that approach is gradually > being properly supported. It's a case of the anarchic approach working > quite well, partly by luck. > > In this case, you have a tag which duplicates and possibly replaces > existing tags; which nobody can agree on the definition for; and which is > interpreted by different tools in different ways. That's a big step > backwards. Simon is actually the last name ;) Yes, this is a bigger move than the breaktrough of the Karlsruhe Schema, but for example post_code=12345 was already quite popular, so the Karlsruhe guys used addr:post_code=12345. In my opinion a good decision, because it clearly showed that objects tagged this way refer to the Karlsruhe Schema, which is well documented in the wiki. We had a similar situation when highway=path started, before different groups made up thier own definitions, differing from the original proposal... -Martin _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk