Re: [Talk-GB] Stupid tags
Dave F. dave...@... writes: ['historical' tag] It doesn't describe a physical feature, more a point of interest. And POIs are by their nature subjective. Which is why it shouldn't be used as a primary solitary key tag (if at all). Unfortunately, it appears that is what's occurring. The physicality of an entity should get priority. Ah yes I see what you mean. Although even then, you can imagine historical points of interest such as the site of old battles (shown on OS maps, so there is precedent) or the sinking of the Titanic, which have no physical existence. There (and only there) the historical tag could be primary. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Stupid tags
Dave F. dave...@... writes: Also historical=* is just too subjective to be useful. Everything, by definition, is historical; even this email. Yes, it's a subjective tag. My criterion is that if something might possibly be rendered on a printed map with Ye Olde Gothic Lettering, then it's historical. It doesn't describe a physical feature, more a point of interest. And POIs are by their nature subjective. -- Ed Avis e...@waniasset.com ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Stupid tags (was: natural=tree)
What a stupid thing to do (and denotation is a stupid word to use too). Thanks, that gave me a good laugh. I think we can add denotation=cluster to the tagging hall of shame alongside smoothness=very_horrible. Any others? Not sure, but an anagram of denotation would be an appropriate thing to do to this bot and others like it. Maybe we should set up some sort of equivalent of robots.txt in which users can tell bots to stop molesting their data. ;-) Nick ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Stupid tags
Nick Whitelegg wrote on 18/11/2010 11:20: What a stupid thing to do (and "denotation" is a stupid word to use too). Thanks, that gave me a good laugh. I think we can add denotation=cluster to the tagging hall of shame alongside smoothness=very_horrible. Any others? Not sure, but an anagram of "denotation" would be an appropriate thing to do to this bot and others like it. Maybe we should set up some sort of equivalent of "robots.txt" in which users can tell bots to stop molesting their data. ;-) Nick I'd go further than stupid, denotation is the wrong word to use, for two reasons: the intent is to have some more detailed specification of the tree, as I understand it, denotation is a technical term with far more to do with semantics of the description rather than the objects being described. Mainly though, it is an academic term that would be entirely off-putting to the general user even if it were properly used. I would have said plain English was the golden rule for any entry in the system whether it is a tag or a value. The use of terms that are not in common usage may appear to be helpful in making it accurate, but in fact it is just likely to mean that people mis-understand the purpose of a tag anyway. OSM generally does use ordinary words for ordinary things, and in this case it is entirely unclear what differentiation is being described - cluster is about saying that this point on a map represents a number of trees, which is not a denotation. To go down the root(!) of providing detail to tree entries, it is clear that there are many different issues. In my interests, TPO status (individual;group;area not TPO if tag not present) would be a valuable piece of information, as would a number of different features relevant to tree surveying, so a general "thingy" tag disguised by a technical term is particularly unhelpful. Spenny ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Stupid tags
On 18/11/2010 11:03, Ed Avis wrote: Andy Allangravityst...@... writes: What a stupid thing to do (and denotation is a stupid word to use too). Thanks, that gave me a good laugh. I think we can add denotation=cluster to the tagging hall of shame alongside smoothness=very_horrible. Any others? There are too many to list, but whilst this is topical, I have a minor problem with natural=*. It's far too general. I mean, everything under the sun is either natural or man made. Also historical=* is just too subjective to be useful. Everything, by definition, is historical; even this email. I don't have specific alternatives to those, except to say entities should be primarily tagged with their physical attributes. Cheers Dave F. ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Stupid tags
On 18/11/2010 19:36, Dave F. wrote: There are too many to list, but whilst this is topical, I have a minor problem with natural=*. It's far too general. I mean, everything under the sun is either natural or man made. Also historical=* is just too subjective to be useful. Everything, by definition, is historical; even this email. You're assuming that the actual tag text really means something. It doesn't. It's just a convenient hook to hang things from, and you shouldn't take it too literally. If it helps, imagine the letters in reverse order, or rotated using a Caesar cipher. I'm going to write a longer essay on this subject tomorrow at WhereCamp, I think. -- Jonathan (Jonobennett) ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Stupid tags
On 18/11/2010 20:07, Jonathan Bennett wrote: On 18/11/2010 19:36, Dave F. wrote: There are too many to list, but whilst this is topical, I have a minor problem with natural=*. It's far too general. I mean, everything under the sun is either natural or man made. Also historical=* is just too subjective to be useful. Everything, by definition, is historical; even this email. You're assuming that the actual tag text really means something. No, I'm aware it's meaningless. I'm saying it *should* mean something. If key tags don't mean anything, why have them? Cheers Dave F. ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
Re: [Talk-GB] Stupid tags
On 18/11/2010 20:18, Dave F. wrote: If key tags don't mean anything, why have them? It's a quirk of the way tagging works more than anything. We need key-value tags for properties like name=* and oneway=* and there's no point in having two separate tagging systems for class type tags and property type tags. I believe, once upon a time, shortly before I got involved in OSM, there was a class=* tag, but since you always had to have a highway=* with each class=highway, and you couldn't have more than one class=* value, it was decided it wasn't very useful after all, and it stopped. In an ideal world, you could have more than one value per key, and we'd have (for example) class=secondary_highway or class=theatre, or some shit like that. This makes the whole which key? problem go away. The few occasions where you need to assign two separate classes to the same feature make that problematic. There's a certain amount of utility in being able to grab all highway-related features in something like XAPI or Osmosis using highway=*, but for less clear cut or overlapping keys, like tourism=* or historic=* it just doesn't work as well. You could use duplicate keys (tourism=theatre, culture=theatre), but you could just as easily use TagTransform to solve the same problem. So we have keys for class tags mostly because we *have* to, and because for certain types of features it helps with identifying a general grouping for the tag, but not all. Most of all, changing foo=bar for baz=bar achieves absolutely *nothing*. Hope this helps -- if I've missed a point let me know, because this is turning into a good draft of a post for a wider audience. Jonathan -- Jonathan (Jonobennett) ___ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
