On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 9:51 PM, Steve Bennett <[email protected]> wrote: > On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 10:28 PM, Roy Wallace <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> I think we should aim for a globally consistent database, because >> 1) I travel a fair bit (I've never been to Bulgaria, but maybe someday >> soon) >> 2) I do NOT want to be limited to "Noppia-compatible" routing software >> if I visit Noppia (etc.) > > Consider it "internationally aware" software. Routing software that is aware > of the local laws of each country seems obvious.
Um...what??? That will not write itself. Do you expect us to successfully digitize and maintain a database of all laws of all countries? In a wiki, even? That's ambitious! I'd prefer to stick to mapping what's on the ground. >> 3) I think it's not that hard to be globally consistent - it just >> comes at the cost of verbosity (which is cheap) > > I think verbosity is expensive. My experience is with Wikipedia, where > everyone always thinks the labour is free. It may be free, but it's finite. > And the more you get people to waste their time doing tedious busywork, the > less time they spend doing useful things. I agree that tedious busywork is not good. But we have computers - surely we're able to use presets etc. so that more verbosity/explicitness requires negligible amounts of additional labour. Let's get the tagging schemes right first. Seriously, it's not going to be a big deal to e.g. add foot=yes/no to cycleways. Look at the big picture - we're making a map of the entire world. We're trying to find the best and easiest way to do it. Remember that additional labour adding foot=yes/no can *avoid* future labour spent sorting out messes like this one. And it can give us a better quality result. >> Adding tags that help clarify what I mean does not piss me off. I am >> quite happy to add direction=clockwise to roundabouts if necessary. >> Ultimately, why not aim to have direction=* applied to ALL >> roundabouts? > > Sure, by all means, have that tag applied. But forcing someone to manually > add it when the roundabout in question is in a left-drive country is > insulting. Maybe the client could add it automatically. I don't know. Well, I don't find it insulting. And yes, the "client" (editor) could certainly add it automatically. Remember that we are also not limited to current versions of current editors - editors can be improved. Let's get the tagging right first - editor improvements will follow. I think we shouldn't "tag for the editor" (if you know what I mean) :P _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
