On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 2:51 PM, Laurence Penney <l...@lorp.org> 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 talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
