Rather than "Mismatching key names", what about "Counterintuitive key names"?
On Fri, Jan 24, 2020 at 9:20 AM Volker Schmidt <[email protected]> wrote: > OK, > my wording was intentionally provoking. But this basic conceptual issue is > at the base of many unnecessary tagging modifications. > I refrained from adding the OSM version of the duck principle. > One of the items in the proposed page illustrates well why I think people > need to get the message that we only use words as codes, not as meaning. > > We had for a long time waterway=canal and for the outline we used > water=riverbank (and we still mostly do use that combination). Perfectly > working, we did not care if we were mapping the bank of a river or the bank > of a canal. At some point someone came up with the idea that canal is not a > river hence a riverbank is not a canalbank and introduced water=canal for > the concept of the canalbank. > (I am a bit exaggerating here the reason for the change was different - > see the thread "[Tagging] Canal banks") > > My basic message is tags are made of key and value and everything is > codewords. We have build a whole structure into the codewords with several > levels of colons in order to make extracting things form the database > easier, but this is not part of the core structure of the database. > > There is no mismatch between natural=water and water=canal if you > understand that all keys and values are codewords. Human readability is a > convenience, but is not reflected in the data structure at all. > > > > On Fri, 24 Jan 2020 at 15:31, Jarek Piórkowski <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> On Fri, 24 Jan 2020 at 09:12, Volker Schmidt <[email protected]> wrote: >> > Il ven 24 gen 2020, 11:51 Mateusz Konieczny via Tagging < >> [email protected]> ha scritto: >> >> One of topics often appearing is mismatch between meaning of key >> >> and key text. >> >> ... >> >> It is created at >> >> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mismatching_key_names >> >> but page name is horrible. Ideas for a better one is welcome. >> >> >> >> Also, I only started it - help in expanding and improving it >> >> is highly welcomed. >> > >> > These are no mismatches. >> > Keys and values are in principle arbitrary sequences of alphanumeric >> characters. By convention we try to make them mnemonic by using strings >> that somehow help us remember the meaning of the string. By convention we >> use British English words for keys and values, plus numbers, mainly for >> values. >> > >> > This explanation needs to be placed prominently on the new page, to >> avoid any doubt. >> >> Please no. That wiki page is a much better explanation than this "it's >> only symbols". >> >> Keys and values are ways for us as human editors to communicate with >> each other. Those are commonly called "words" - well, at least in >> Canadian English, I don't know about British English. >> >> It is definitely worth explaining why some words as OSM editors use >> them are different from words as the rest of the world (or a subset of >> the world) might use them. >> >> --Jarek >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Tagging mailing list >> [email protected] >> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging >> > _______________________________________________ > Tagging mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging > -- Evan Derickson [email protected]
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