Hi! 2009/8/4 Nick Black <[email protected]>: > Hi Guys, > I haven't heard anything back from you, so I'm going to annoy you some more. > I'm really keen to hear any thoughts you have on how OSM editors could > better support the German mapping community. After all the calls to ban > Potlatch, there must be some constructive criticism out there ;-) > Any ideas are appreciated.
First of all: I do not think that the discontent with Potlatch comes from being an English language editor, but from other aspects of it's design. The long time missing "edit with save" and other features solved a lot of that and critics have become very silent lately. My 2 cents on the difficulties of tagging in Germany and the ideal editor: Translation is an issue within the community: Especially the wiki-pages are often translated incorrectly and discussions about the right interpretation are difficult. However, the problem does often not arise from translation itself, but from difficulties of applying the English road classification system on German conditions. We have for example, neither a "trunk-road", nor a "unclassified" road in our legal classification. The adoption of these terms can only be taken vaguely and leaves much room for individual interpretation. Tagging a trunk road is easy in England - if the sign says it's a trunk-road, you'll tag it a trunk road. In Germany however, in most of the cases it's very likely that a combination of tags has to be applied There are of course roads similar to a trunk-road: We have "motorway-like" roads, which are basically the same as motorways but do no have to, but can have, a special legal classification. Regardless, if they are not a legal Autobahn, those roads are tagged as trunk. On the other hand, we have the legal class of "Kraftfahrstrasse", which are often, but do not have to be, "motorway-like" and are tagged explicitly as "motorroad=true". With unclassified it's even more difficult: For a Germans, it is very hard to understand, that a road that is called "unclassified" is actually just classified as "unclassified". German country roads are being classified by their maintainer, which is either Kreis (regional), Landes (state) or Bundes (federal). The Problem is, that the status of the responsible maintainer does not say anything about the status of the actual road. A Kreisstrasse can be bigger, in better shape and more important to traffic than a Bundesstraße nearby, it might even be autobahn-like. There is no actual consensus, which factor is more important for tagging: Size, classification or importance to whatever regional traffic? Tagging wars arouse about this question, in both the database and the wiki, and so do lengthly discussions. Municipally maintained roads make things worse: They are (of course) somehow officially classified - but they are not marked as such and the classification is basically unknown. "highway=unclassified" is widely tagged in distinction to a residential road as "a road having no distinct legal classification (Kreis-/Landes-/Bundesstrasse) and are no residential road", while other mappers interpret unclassified as a road somehow larger or more important than a residential road and see it as part of a hierarchy ranging from track (lowest) to motorway (highest). An ideal editor for Germany can not to be based on a translated key=value scheme, but will always always have to take the necessity of combining tags into account. I think, it would help if entering tags would move away from the text /checkbox form to a more graphical and questionnairish style: A click on a motorway picture could than start a dialog like: "Is it a legal Autobahn, or Autobahn-like? Autobahn-like would lead to "Is it a Kraftfahrstrasse?" if not: "is cycling allowed? on a track or lane?" continuing with "ref, maxspeed ect." A click on a inner city road would bring up the question "Is it a road where people live?" "Is it a Kreis/Landes/Bundesstr.?" The whole process should be an a mixture of questions and interactive graphics: "Does the road have a cycleway?" should produce a graphical feedback with further options. The Questions would not have to be represented by an actual tag in the database: Based on sample photos graphics and questions like "Is the road a connection road for interregional traffic?" the editor should be supposed to know all tags and combinations and could, for example, upgrade a unclassified road out of a residential area to a tertiary road. The aim should be to keep Otto Mapper away from the technical stuff: It must not be necessary for a newbie to crawl through tons of wikipages with contradictory information and inconsensus to find find out the right tagging. He should have an intuitive interface to enter what he sees in front of his house - not worrying about tags and combinations, that long ago were invented for a country far away from him ;) bye, Stefan _______________________________________________ Talk-de mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-de
