For the record, I'm 100% against OSM becoming a place for general historical data unless, at the very least, it's been proved that this kind of historical geodata can work well in a parallel database, and shows no sign of interfering with the task of mapping the world as it is. In my first contribution to this thread I listed numerous concerns that including all of history would give rise to, and don't think I came across as supportive.
I'm not sure what you're saying - that 18,000 tag usages is insufficient for someone to try to sort out a mess of tag values? In my recent message I hoped to sort out the poor usage of a key, about which there's apparently a lot of interest and which in itself is pretty harmless for tagging existing buildings, usefully answering the question "how long has this feature been here?". (Not to denigrate wastebasket mappers, I don't think I'm the only mapper to find such data more interesting than wastebasket locations.) To this end I proposed a general date format that might be potentially useful anywhere that OSM uses human-entered dates. Could you point to a few occurrences of start_date that refer to "seasonal hours of a tourist attraction only open during the summer" or the like? (I couldn't find any in my review, but I'm using Taginfo which isn't ideal for this stuff.) I thought opening_hours handled this well. In a quick look around I did find some 2010-07-30 start_date tags on the new London cycle hire nodes - seemed reasonable to me, in the historical sense. - L On 10 Nov 2010, at 21:40, Richard Weait wrote: > On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 2:51 PM, Laurence Penney <[email protected]> wrote: >> It would be good to have consistency in the start_date value. Taginfo >> reports 18313 usages (2814 distinct), of which these are examples of values >> other than simple 4-digit years[1]: > > [ ... ] > >> So it's clear there's a demand for: exact dates; general approximations; >> approximations to the month, season, century; before <date> and after >> <date>; early <period> and late <period>, maybe also mid <period>; date >> ranges; multiple values; BC and AD. > > There may be a "clear demand" or interest in start_date, but it is a > limited one based on your measurement of 18k appearances in the data > base. > > There are also 18k instances of amenity=waste_basket, [1] 28th in > amenity and 18k instances of highway=stop [2] 28th in highway. Both > waste_basket and stop are clearly defined and are likely to reflect > only one specific thing. > > By comparison, start_date, may well be used to note the construction > date or commissioning date of a bridge, but might also define the > seasonal hours of a tourist attraction only open during the summer. > Only one of these supports your assertion. I would argue that > start_date, for your specific "beginning in an historical sense" use > is much less prevalent in the data base than you suggest and that > there is much less "clear demand" for an historical start_date than > 18,000 appearances might suggest. > > That said, I find the idea of OpenHistoryMap to be a curious idea. I > think the idea has potential interest to historians, students, > developers, genealogists and others. But I also think it is > orthogonal to OSM. If you find the OSM stack helpful in creating > OpenHistoryMap then do so. It sounds to me like a Really Big Job > though. Not the work of just a weekend. > > But go for it. Build it based on the OSM stack. If it can be done in > a way that keeps OpenHistoryMap contributors happy, and doesn't break > OSM tools downstream, it might be considered for merging into some > future OSM. Even if it does break downstream OSM tools, you'll still > have a working OpenHistoryMap, and will have had a leg up from > starting with the working OSM stack. > > [1] http://taginfo.openstreetmap.de/keys/amenity > [2] http://taginfo.openstreetmap.de/keys/highway > > _______________________________________________ > talk mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
