On Fri, Feb 15, 2008 at 12:57:41AM +0100, Stefan Keller wrote: > model and will never evolve or be re-imported from other databases. Users > will be 'surprised' when they miss their data on the map like with 'Tunnel ' > instead 'Tunnel' or with things like that '¨name'='Südstrasse'. My proposal > would eliminate that.
In OSM this problem is solved not by restricting what people can tag but by having tools like the JOSM validator plugin and Maplint that will tell you if there is data that "looks wrong" to the computer according to some criteria. It is the job of a human then to decide whether it actually is wrong in his opinion and fix it. I expect these tools to improve over time and eventually find most cases where people have accidentally used the wrong tag. With this solution we keep the "default" openness: People who want to use unusual tags on purpose are not restricted. > Now obviously it's about "geographic data" as said in the OSM homepage and > its about databases and it's hopefully not HTML. The model you choose it a > sort of meta model which is ok for initial capturing but not optimal for > post-processing and showing it in maps - and the difference (from your point > of view) is just restricting key characters to some smaller set! Thats exactly what we are doing and want to be doing: We are capturing data in the most flexible way possible. Everybody who wants to *use* the data for something has to pick the subset of the data he is interested in and can convert it to any format he likes best and that is suited for his needs. Of course there are ways to store subsets of the data in more efficient forms and many people do that, but everybody has different needs and so needs different subsets of the data and in different forms. The needs for somebody drawing a map are very different from somebody doing routing, for instance. The OSM data model is not designed to be efficient, it is designed to be flexible. Jochen -- Jochen Topf [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.remote.org/jochen/ +49-721-388298 _______________________________________________ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dev
