Triggered by the discussion about leisure=aquatics vs leisure=sports_centre+subtag, I would like to discuss the tendency of structured vs. duck tagging.
Thanks to Martin who pointed me to Richard's coining of the latter term: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Duck_tagging, and I know there is a lot of controversy particularly around the 'path' issue, which I do not intend to warm up here. There is however some observation that a quite a number of mappers prefer, and move to, more structured tagging, once there has been an appropriate scheme designed, because in the long run it helps to tag more precisely. There is a nice analysis about tag migration by Matias Dahl: http://matiasdahl.iki.fi/2015/finding-related-amenity-tags-on-the-openstreetmap When you scroll down, you find the table which ranks the "leave_ratio and transition_count". It turns out that that transition of amenity=nursing_home to amenity=social_facility leads the table with 13758 transitions (plus 2417 to community_centre) which is 84%+15%= 99% of those who migrated away from nursing_home. Thus with the appearance of the structured scheme for amenity=social_facility (41138) + social_facility=group_home (21057) + social_facility:for=senior (5977) the former duck-tagged amenity=nursing_home (still 11580) could be described much clearer, and in addition the group homes can be much better distinguished e.g. from social_facility=assisted_living (9598) which previously had no proper tag. My conclusion is that a majority of mappers prefers a better structure and move away from tag fragmentation when they have a chance. This then helps the data consumers which do not need to run after each new duck tag to be implemented to cover a certain class of features. tom _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
