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

Reply via email to