On 2020-04-14 21:16, Joseph Eisenberg wrote:
OK, but are there any countries in the world where you can would
normally buy health insurance in the same place as car or home or life
insurance?
I don't know. Many countries might not even allow this.
If not, then this is a theoretical problem only.
The problem is having a messy namespace with tags that sort of mean the
same thing, but aren't the same, which makes understanding the data much
harder, for what I view as no good reason.
"if you want to ask "how many insurance offices are there and what
is the breakdown by type", it's much more natural to search one key..."
It's all one key either way ("office"), and database users already are
very accustomed to searching for more than one tag to find a set of
similar things. It only takes a few more seconds to add another tag to
an Overpass-API query.
It's not the time to change the query. It's the semantic load on
everything that looks at the data. Every renderer and search program
has to learn about this. That's not so bad in terms of work, but when
they don't know about it, users get missing results.
But it takes more time for each mapper to add 2 tags instead of one.
Mapper time is the most precious resource in OpenStreetMap: we don't
have enough mappers, and most are working for free, for fun.
I also have to often tag "barrier=wall" "wall=dry_stone". Should we
than have "barrier=wall_dry_stone" to save me a few keystrokes? This
way becomes madness if taken to the extreme with every detail promoted
into the top-level tag.
In my mapping of POIs, the big amount time is actually going places.
The next biggest is having to read the wiki to figure out what tags to
use for things that I haven't mapped before. When using vespucci,
another big thing is actually typing the name correctly.
If there is a preset for "insurance" and a subtype for what kind, I
think most people would complete their tagging in seconds. And this is
something that isn't super common, and many people mapping it will be
tagging one, very occasionally.
So I really think this de-normalized tagging, to use db terms, is a
false optimization that doesn't help anyone.
Let's make things as easy as possible for mappers: one tag for one main feature.
That is begging the question of "main feature", and what's easy.
We have to have summarization or we will have thousands of top-level
tags. To me, a business that sells insurance is a kind of thing, and
sensible to label. Labeling what kind is perhaps of value, but I don't
see people shoppingfor health insurance by searching for such places.
And, having a preset with a choice pulldown makes it easy. Having a
top-level shop preset choice with 10x the number of things in it is not
easier, as it becomes too big to scan through.
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