Hi, > The world has an infinite diversity and we can't go inventing new tag > combinations for all of them. We need to think hierarchically, start > with the real defining characteristics: land/sea/road/rail/etc and use > subtags for the finegrained stuff.
While this is true, it would not be necessary to stuff the hierarchy into the tagging scheme. Suppose you say something like this (just an example, not meant as a suggestion for real-world use): 1st level: natural=water 2nd: water=standing (as opposed to flowing) 3nd: standing_water=lake (as opposed to puddle, reservoir...) and I suppose biologists will have a number of additional levels. What you're saying would now amount to copy this hierarchy into every single body of water by tagging it natural=water,water=standing, standing_water=lake,... - just so that a renderer knowing only of natural=water can still render it. Obviously this makes it easy to understand if you see the object out of context, and makes it easy for the renderer. But this is at the cost of storing the hierarchy a thousand seperate times in the database, with a high potential for errors (something tagged natural=forest and standing_water=lake would show up green on some renderers and blue on others, depending what level they look at...) and also considerable workload should the hierarchy ever be changed. Keeping the hierarchy *external*, say on a wiki page that defines that everything tagged "standing_water=lake" is also "water=standing" and everything that is "water_standing" is also "natural=water", would require only *one* tag on the object; the renderer would have to load the hierarchy from the external source but that would really not be too difficult. Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail [EMAIL PROTECTED] ## N49°00.09' E008°23.33' _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
