On 01/02/10 21:48, Frederik Ramm wrote: > You'll only move the fight to somewhere else. People will discuss > endlessly about what should be on the tool tip of the cycleway button. > "Use this only if there is a blue sign with a bicycle on it" - "But my > country has no blue signs with bicycles".
But don't you realise that's an enormous improvement? People can have that argument all day, and the author of the tool can switch it back and forth three times before breakfast, but it doesn't affect _consumers_ of the data, because they have a consistent tagging scheme for their computers to read. However, if the way something is tagged is the thing under dispute, and there are two ways you know about and three you don't, any map you try and create is going to suck. If we had one agreed way to tag each thing, and lots of arguments about how to represent that in editors, it would be a gargantuan step forward in the usability of OSM data. > (In my OSM talks I like to show a communist-era poster about a five-year > command economy plan. Command economy sounds like a good idea on paper > but it turns out that the amount of planning required to get it to work > is more than mankind can muster. The same, I think, is true for a > world-wide OSM Ontology.) The problem with a command economy is not that there's a single way of doing things, is that it's imposed without consultation. Agreeing on one way of doing things is not intrinsically bad. Road signs in the UK are all laid out the same way. There is no (or very, very little) freedom for creative expression on the part of the person making the sign. This is _good_ for drivers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_Road_Signs Gerv _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
