Colin Smale wrote: > Anarchy will > produce "WOM" - Write Only Memory - whereby everybody adds their own > little bit of information using their own ontology, resulting in minimal > data quality.
We don't have an anarchy. We have an informal meritocracy, where people influence the whole depending on their amount of contributions to the project. This is valid for both mappers and developers. Someone who maps large regions of the map has a larger influence on the tagging present in the database than someone who adds a few POIs. And popular applications have a huge influence on tagging. You seem to believe that people make up their own ontologies in isolation. But that's observably not true. Mappers /voluntarily/ use established tags, as long as they know them and don't fundamentally disagree with them. For obvious reasons: They want their data to be useful, and this requires applications to understand said data. Application developers act in a similar way. They, too, will voluntarily try to stick to established conventions, for equally obvious reasons: They want to use the data produced by the mappers, so they need to speak the same "language". This process means that once popular applications actually use some set of tags, usage will - with few exceptions - gradually become less varied. And this effect will only become more pronounced with the current popularization of editor presets. Tobias Knerr _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging