This morning I came across a name tag on a power line<http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=17/53.18607/-1.14961>. I believe this is now quite a common practice (> 8% of lines in an 3-month old data-set). Personally I deplore it:
- I have never found a convenient sign on a power line giving it's name. - It is not derived from ground-truth. - It is not verifiable by other mappers. - It's tagging for the renderer (which may not work once the rules for "name" have been revised in CartoCSS) - The names appear not to be names, but descriptions, we have a suitable key for this, oddly enough called "description". - Some name tags include "National Grid". we have a perfectly suitable tag called "operator" for this information. - I very much doubt that National Grid use names of this type for sending out line engineers. - Most of these names just appear to describe the two end points of the line. OSM is a geo-database this information can be found by suitable queries. Given that adding non-verifiable names seems to *de rigueur* I propose that in homage to Edmund Crispin I propose we name a random selection of power=pylon as "The Pisser". More seriously I suggest that these name tags be removed and replaced by suitable use of "operator" and "description". Jerry P.S. I am not wholly against using "name" for what are in reality "description", but such usage *MUST* relate to something which can be verified on the ground. Brownfield sites which may still be visible as buildings on Bing come to mind: in the form name="former XYZ Factory". However, perhaps we should discuss this type of usage too.
_______________________________________________ Talk-GB mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
