On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 1:23 PM, Steve Hill <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Thu, 24 Apr 2008, Christopher Schmidt wrote: > > > > I can't claim to have the right answer, but I will state that it is not > > common in geographic software to have namespaced attributes: in general, > > when this is the case, it is a namespace based only on the object type > > which has a specific schema. (In this case, that would be something like > > pisteLift, since the dataset would be a list of pisteLifts.) > > > > But in common software, do the objects have an explicit type? In > OpenStreetMap they do not - the type is determined by a bunch of arbitrary > tags, for which you need background knowledge of which tags define the > object type and which just define attributes (e.g. there is no unified > "type" tag which you know will always define what the object is).
Why would I want to deal with an arbitrary "attribute" tag if I didn't know the domain I was working in already? And more to the point, how does requiring me to use a specific tag name for that domain actually help with this? What's the difference between searching piste:lift then getting occupancy, and searching piste:lift then piste:lift:occupancy (other than typing more)? If you're dealing with piste lifts you know the piste lift schema. We only have a problem if there is a name clash with something that can quite reasonably be also on a piste lift. Generally you find that in this kind of situation you actually wanted to make it a different object such as a relation. Dave _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
