Hi all, There was a presentation about something like this at the last SOTM, but I can't remember who did it. Please chime in.
I was talking to a friend just now about mobile editors for OSM and soon enough the discussion shifted towards general usability issues for OSM. A major one for me has always been the culture / language dependency of the tags. Many of the longer threads on this list, and also in real life talking about OSM, are about some form of 'how do I attribute this?' A big part of why that question is so hard to answer is in cultural and language differences. What constitutes a trunk road in Lithuania? What is a chemist in Spain? Not all tags even translate one to one. This will continue to be a challenge. As the range of editors and contributors broadens, this challenge is going to be even greater. Ideally we would have a semantic layer between the user and the database / API. This layer would comprise of an ontology of geographic feature representations in different languages, think a structured version of the different language versions of the Map Features page. The ontology would also include synonyms of feature representations (think chemist's vs pharmacy, motorway vs freeway vs highway). On top of the ontology would be an interface allowing applications to present the end user with features in their own language. This interface would translate input in any language to a generalized classification for insertion in the database. A semantic layer would solve a lot of problems with tagging ambiguity, break down language barriers, help create a cleaner database and generally make OSM more accessible. It would not only be useful for editing, but also for data representation on rendered maps as well as navigation software. Thoughts? Are we doing this already? Martijn van Exel +++...@rtijn.org laziness – impatience – hubris http://schaaltreinen.nl | http://martijnvanexel.nl | http://oegeo.wordpress.com/ twitter / skype: mvexel flickr: rhodes _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk