On 3/18/2015 2:43 PM, Clifford Snow wrote:
Since you are involved with updating the rendering, can you tell us
the process to decide what should be rendered? I realize that part of
it must be stylistic, but what outside influences cause you to include
a tag as part of the standard rendered OSM tile?
I should preface this by stating that these are my opinions, and I know
other OpenStreetMap Carto maintainers look at it differently. They are
also not the opinion of my employer, MapQuest, and the MapQuest Open
style has different cartographic goals.
There are no policies on what is rendered, and types of features are
decided on a case by case basis.
Normally the process of deciding to render a feature and deciding to
render a particular tag are separate. You might decide you want to
render bus stops, but also find that in the region you're rendering
there is a GTFS feed with better data. In OpenStreetMap Carto, these two
steps are more entwined. We're aiming at mappers and want to avoid
additional sources of non-OSM data.
A first consideration is technical. Some of the crazy relation types out
there are not designed in a way that they can be reasonably rendered
with a standard toolchain. If I can't figure out how to write the SQL to
be able to get a data layer suitable for rendering, it almost certainly
won't be rendered.
I'm only interested in rendering established tags. The primary indicator
of this is usage. There are some exceptions to this like national
capitals, where there are only many of them. My view is that a tag
should be able to obtain reasonable usage numbers on its own merits
without being rendered. I also look beyond taginfo numbers to see if
they are being skewed by a small number of contributors, mechanical
edits, or a bulk import.
We don't want to encourage difficult to consume tagging approach. This
is why we will not use disused=yes. (#111)
The wiki is a source I use, but just one among many.
A good read is Andy's comment about changing tags:
https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/230#issuecomment-29238913.
It is related.
And of course, all of this is done in a limited amount of available
time. If I decide to work on something with the style it means I'm not
working on a different part of it. It's zero sum for me, and I always
have more I can work on. Rendering new types of features is about bottom
of the priority list for me right now.
Would you render a tag without a wiki entry, or with just a proposal?
In principle, if it were an established tag? Yes. It's very unlikely an
established tag would not have a wiki page.
How does the fact that it may be useful to specific groups, ie,
cyclists which has its own style impact your decisions?
I don't particularly consider the presence of specialist styles. There
are styles for most topical interests these days.
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