2011/1/10 Martijn van Exel <m...@rtijn.org>: ...> 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.
> 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... > A semantic layer would solve a lot of problems with tagging ambiguity, > break down language barriers, > Thoughts? Are we doing this already? IMHO we are already doing something like this in our wiki, but the main problems won't be solved hereby. The main problems are the details ;-). Of course you could have a list (or ontology) that says that amenity=fuel would be de:Tankstelle, but it wouldn't tell you that you can at almost all de:Tankstelle get compressed air for your bike, or cigarettes at night, while in many other countries this is not a valid assumption. This is just an example, but you will have these assumptions for most of the tags: for the local mapper they are included, but on a global basis they won't be valid. The meaning of a tag is somehow always dependent on the cultural background / area. cheers, Martin _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
