"Viewing from higher altitudes" here, it should be said that "tagging," tagging improvements, "how we better tag into the future..." all seem to be getting more difficult as OSM grows. One fundamental that just emerged is "no need for such a feature since it overlaps with other features and could very well be described as a property of one of those features." Others then chimed in said "hey, we have a long legacy of some tagging which we cannot or should not simply discard."
These are (often) at odds with one another. They both have merit: OSM must grow, OSM must expand ontologies and tagging schemes so they are newer, smarter, easier-to-understand, with a more-international/worldwide perspective than they have had, yet we must also respect that OSM has had 18 years to "grow up and become an adult" and it did so with many, many existing tags which persist today and are sturdy components of our map (and renderers, and routers and other downstream use cases). In many cases, these "legacy" tags are not really legacy at all, they are simply "what is" and they will remain into the future. Sometimes, other schemes will grow "around" them, leaving them in place, but growing into the future (an example, public_transport:version=1 and 2). However, I've also "grown up" with OSM for most of its life, and I've experience the pain of both "wholesale discard" of older tags (HEY, what happened to all my work, those beautiful renderings, the routing that was so clever...) and the real growth that newer tagging brings. So, it's a mixed bag, it has its benefits, it has its growing pains, too. Without proposing anything in particular (I'm "flying at a high altitude" for exactly that perspective and reason), let's try to keep this in mind. We don't want to "throw the baby out with the bath water" (and English idiom that means to discard too much because things get a little muddy) but at the same time, we must grow, and we should respect the legacy tagging that got us here. Balances CAN be struck. _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
