On Fri, Jun 22, 2018 at 7:45 AM Martin Koppenhoefer <dieterdre...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I really welcome this discussion about these procedures, and the > participation of Bryan. It is clear that any more rules or policies mean more > work and less time for the fun things, and a slow down in development in > general, but I feel it is important to have many eyes on this process, > because it is at the core of our project (tags are everything when it comes > to the meaning of things in the database). To keep it short, I have not > commented on everything.
Yes, it's good that people are engaging. While "any tag you like" is wonderful advice when tagging something that hasn't been tagged before, it starts to fall down when you expect that the data will be of general interest and that there will be objects all over that have the property you're trying to tag. When trying to make tagging decisions, I accord much greater weight to the opinions of data consumers, be they the developers of routers, navigation aids, renderers, statistical analyses, or whatever. Ultimately, anything that is tagged is for the consumers, or else it is ultimately meaningless: what is the point of tagging data that nobody will read? It's better to choose tags that will make the job of consuming the data easier, even if that makes for a small amount of additional work for the mapper. (Within reason, of course!) Second only to comprehensibility to a data consumer is integrity of the data model. A tagging system that, for instance, requires vast numbers of tags to be repeated among objects that should instead be grouped in a relation is going to be difficult both to abstract for consumption and for mappers to maintain. Providing excruciating detail about individual objects is by far the least important to me. Unless some set of data consumers have a plan to deal with that detail, it's highly likely to be wasted effort. It's also likely to go stale faster, because there will be fewer mappers interested in maintaining it. Intelligent defaults matter. I use iD very seldom, so I can't really address Martin's arguments about what should and should not be broken out there, in terms of accessibility to the layman. It appears that the choice is being made to target a skill level below my own, and that's fine, even if some of his specific recommendations miss a few things that I care about. (Example: For a coniferous wood, I care if the dominant species is Pinus strobus, Pinus rigida, a combination of Abies spp,/Picea spp., or Larix laricena. That's because I will find very different conditions underfoot - white pine and tamarack both favour wetlands, pitch pine will have a fairly open understory because pitch pine forests burn frequently, spruce/fir at elevation grows in dense thickets) But that's fine, as long as iD doesn't mess with the underlying tagging; I'm happy to use JOSM or Meerkartor or external scripts to get the tagging I want, and do my own rendering at need. Bryan's choices may seem arbitrary, but this follows a general tenet of open-source development: "he who does the work makes the rules." _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
