Ignoring for the moment the whole "how do we change it" thing brought up by the emergency tags, there seems to be a whole underlying issue that's worth looking at.
There seems to be a disconnect between two groups of people - those who would like a more defined grouping of tags, and those who think that it doesn't matter, just stick everything under a few main tag groups (amenity, shop, etc). I thought it may be worth a bit of time looking at the pro's and con's of each approach, so at least we can understand each other better. Maybe then we can weigh up the costs and benefits of each approach, from both the tagging and consuming side of things, and see if one comes out on top. Defined groupings approach Pros - by having a things in more defined groups, it's easier to have default rendering if you don't understand what the value means. EG amenity=karitane_centre tells me very little, health= or medical= at least tells me it's health related. - There's less tags to search through in a given area than in an all in one grouping - easier to find a tag for a given item if it's not using the name you'd expect. If your editor does this for you, this is less of a benefit, but no editor has every tag. - tags with confusing similar names that mean different things may have more context given by the group they're in Cons - We'd have to change a lot of data to get to this stage. And all the tools that consume it. - Not every tag fits well in just one group, and if you look in the wrong group for a tag, you won't find it. All in one approach Pros - We already do it like this, nothing needs to change Cons - The more varied tags there are in one group (eg amenity) the less useful the group itself as an entity is. It might as well just be various= Can anybody think of anything else? Stephen _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
