2011/1/10 Martijn van Exel <m...@rtijn.org>: > (forgot to copy to talk) > > On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 6:35 PM, Ed Avis <e...@waniasset.com> wrote: >> Martijn van Exel <m <at> rtijn.org> writes: > The latter. The user would be able to tag a feature with "chemist", > "pharmacy", "farmacia or "apotheek" and that would result in the same > coding in the OSM database (currently: shop=chemist).
amenity=pharmacy, dispensing=yes/no When consuming > OSM data, the process could be reversed; based on the locale, a > feature tagged "shop=chemist" could (would) be output as being one of > these culturally determined Things. Note that a "chemist", a > "pharmacy", a "farmacia" and an "apotheek" are names for something > that is similar across cultures and languages, but not literally the > same. > > The idea is to *avoid* having different classifications on the > database level, even though one concept could be represented by two > different names in one language (consider freeway / highway). Any > ambiguity arising from that would have to be handled by additional > attributes. I fear that a system like that will soon become utterly complex, thus disabling most of the mappers of taking part in the "tag-development-process". It would shift the discussions away from the ML and wiki to defining the semantic rule set. And still we would have to have definitions in natural language to define what a feature is about, so there is no guarantee that there won't be contradictions or different tags with the same meaning. I agree that it is a good idea to develop such a ruleset (or extend an existing one like linked geodata) to make the usage of our dataset easier (for developers), but I agree with you: it is not a magic wand. cheers, Martin _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk