2009/10/1 Frederik Ramm <frede...@remote.org>: > It's a kind of slippery slope situation. There is fear that once it has > been proven that standardisation works for true/false values, there will > be demands to standardise everything else as well.
I think you are exagurating things a little, however a little standarisation would go a long way, although you have a vested interest in keeping the status quo because you've built a commercial model around it. > This would be positive for the users of our data in the short term > because it means they would not have to interpret the data; however it > would remove dynamism from the project and require mappers who want to > invent something new to apply to the standardisation committee first, What exactly would be wrong with doing that exactly? > and we feel that this would be a severe detriment to further > participation on the mapper side. OSM flourishes partly because mappers > feel that they can help shape the project, and contribute what they > think is important, rather than just being mechanical turks (without the > payment). I think you are over stating the importance of people feeling they can contribute by using any tags they please, I keep coming back to the example of using some random names to describe road types, this wouldn't do anyone any good, and there is a very good reason there is a limited number of highway tags for highway types. > In the long term, standardisation would kill the project, and thus not I disagree, it hasn't killed the linux project, and in fact standardisation helps things to flourish more often than not because things can work together harmouniously, imagine what web browsers would be like without standards, it would be an even bigger, uglier mess than we have today. _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
