On 11/01/2008, David Earl <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I think a lot of the discussions we end up having are because we are > forced to put a feature into a sometimes arbitrary or not-quite-right > category.
very true, they are poorly selected, but they were based on what was known at he time - i.e. very little. OSM is still very young, but it is very easy to make en masse changes as we learn. some tags are form-based (physical characteristics), some use-based (conceptual characteristics), which is inconsistent, they all need to be one or another or we get overlaps. this is one of the first changes i have been considering proposing, but i think we should wait till more tags are developed until we do anything > But why do we need a category at all? Might it not be better to simply > say "this is a tram stop and these are its properties". > > Instead of > highway=primary, ref=A1303, name=High Street > we'd say > primary_road(ref=A1303, name=High Street) > [note: please don't think I'm proposing a syntax here, I'm just > illustrating the concept - a concept which is not uncommon] categories make it very easy to select a wide group of items based on their properties. for highways it would be fairly trivial to select 'primary_road', 'secondary_road'. etc. in a multi-select, but some categories - shop - will have hundreds of sub-types. this enables others to very easily make custom maps, only showing the data they want, by quickly hiding other information > And instead of pointlessly arguing over whether a museum is tourist or > historic (a current proposal to change one to the other was circulated > earlier), it would simply be > museum(name=Science Museum) if you have any arguments against a proposal, please join in the discussion - everyone's opinion is considered > A tram stop is just a tram stop. A bus_guideway is just that, there's no > need to argue the nuances of whether it is a railway-like feature or a > highway-like feature - it doesn't then matter. no. this is one area where current maps fall down. what we are doing enables very easy processing of a lot of tags/groups of tags and to produce complex queries very quickly _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
