Hi, It seems to me that tags have proliferated because as time has gone by, people have invented more-and-more uses for OSM -- and that is good!
However, it is a problem because mappers are trying to accomplish very different things from the same set of tags. Here is a set of distinct problems I can think of off the top of my head: * Classical map features. Cities, roads, forests, ferrylines. Where does a road/path lead? How do I get from A to B? Bridges, railway crossings, etc. * Legal rights. Is this road accessible to the public? Am I allowed to drive a car here? Bicycle? Horse? * Administrative: Who owns this road/area and who takes care of it? * Terrain. Is this road suited for bike-racing? Mountain bikes? 4WDs? Is it steep? How steep? * Surface: paved, gravel, grass sand? * Environmental: Chemical/Radioactive pollution? * Security: where is there a phone, hospital, mountain shelter? Wild animals? So it appears there is also an evolutiont in tags to encompass more and more of these distinct (and useful!) pieces of information, but unfortunately tags are being added in a ad-hoc manner to solve particular problems without concerns of maintaining a reasonable namespace. The addr: namespace is a good example of how a set of complicated tags can be grouped so they don't interfere with other requirements. As time goes by, who knows what OSM will be used for? Perhaps the public works of some city decides to put their water and electricity lines on the map? Perhaps some agricultural agency wants to use OSM for soil characteristics? The highway=footway is IMHO an alias for the more complex highway=path foot=yes surface=paved etc. construction. I think aliases are perfectly legitimate constructs when dealing with very common situations, and furthermore, much easier for newbies to remember and deal with. Perhaps it would be constructive to discuss the tagging structure considering the various purposes tags have, and in line with the good example set by the addr: namespace. For example, national OSM teams might have access to their own name spaces, for example fr: (France) de: (Germany) etc.; this would eliminate discussions of the differing interpretations of certain tags that now occupy a lot of the bandwith of this ML. Cheers, Morten _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk