On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 11:33 AM, Jonathan Bennett <[email protected]> wrote: > Andy Allan wrote: >> We have already, it's been made and engineered and everything. Don't >> mistake endless unproductive waffle on the mailing lists as evidence >> that a problem hasn't been solved - it's just people who aren't >> capable pleading to the gods to come and save them from themselves. >> >> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Osmosis/TagTransform > > That's a way of dealing with the problem at a data level, but it doesn't > deal with it at a people level. > > To use TagTransform you either have to accept the presets (which could > be out of date) or come up with your own transformations, which could > take a lot of research and still not reflect what mappers are doing. > > If I understand what Steve is talking about, he wants a way for mappers > to *document* what they think the equivalences are between tags. So that > would be the source material you'd plug into TagTransform. > > For what it's worth, I think that's the wrong way of going about it. I > think multiple descriptions of the same tag in different locales is the > way to go.
+1 there's clearly two places to do this transform; in the editor (i.e: presets) and as a filter before the app which consumes the data (i.e: tagtransform). the two places reflect very different types of transform, though. translations in the editor are clearly for the benefit of the user, who might prefer to see straßen-typ=autobahn rather than highway=motorway. but what really distinguishes an autobahn from a motorway? i assume there's several differences in the laws regarding them, but the primary difference is; all the motorways are in the UK and all the autobahns are in Germany. so it would be inappropriate to tag anything straßen-typ=autobahn in the UK - even if you prefer to have the UI in German while you're editing the UK. isn't it easier to let the editor handle language and locale-specific presentation of the tag, but leave the data more-or-less consistent? translations in the consumer are there (usually) to reduce the vocabulary of OSM down to things that the app can handle. a simple example might be that, for all their differences, it makes some sense to render residential and unclassified roads as the same "minor road" type. this, also, is probably locale-dependent. there have been discussions on talk@ before about whether footpaths are also permissive cycleways in various countries and what the default implication of higway=footway should be. (disclaimer: i only dimly remember this, so i may have got it totally wrong). again, it makes sense to have a fairly universal set of tags in the data with a locale-specific translation. this translation will also be domain-specific; only a cycle-specific renderer, or a cycle routing engine would care about the distinction in the previous example. while i'm all in favour of a library of tag transforms and editor presets, i'm against having any fixed, defined set of tag equivalences. that seems to me like the beginnings of an ontology. cheers, matt _______________________________________________ dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
