On 6/01/2011 2:00 PM, John Smith wrote:
This seems to be an area that OSM *really* lacks, and some people give
usage of tags as a reason not to improve things which doesn't seem
like a valid argument especially when some tags like abutters and
created_by have been depreciated.
I'm spit balling here, but maybe one way to achieve might be to do the
following:
1) Make a proposal and post to the tagging list asking for feedback/discussion
Wait a week or two after the last post and then:
2) Post to the talk list asking for feedback/discussion
3) About 2 weeks after the last discussion/modifications to the
proposal you post a vote request to both the tagging and the talk
lists
Depending on the outcome of the vote, either too many against at which
point you could try modifying the proposal and going back to steps 2
or 3, or if the vote is successful or if there was a lack of interest
in the outcome you could jump to step 4
4) Update the wiki to reflect the outcome
4a) Update Potlatch 2's stylesheets and presets to reflect the outcome
4b) Update JOSM to reflect the outcome
4c) Update Mapnik's stylesheets to reflect the outcome
4d) Update Osmosis's stylesheets to reflect the outcome
4e) Update Mkgmap (err, whatever it's called) to reflect the outcome.
4f) Assist external editors, renderers and other tools to reflect the
outcome (Cloudmade, Mapquest, Nearmap, iPhone apps...)
5) Use the XAPI to find existing tags and mass retag using your JOSM
or any other editor that can handle OSM XML files.
My guess is that this mailing list and talk@ reach a pretty small
proportion of users. Simply announcing "we're changing the tag! please
tag differently from now on!" is not remotely sufficient.
Similarly, doing a mass tag update which is going to break many existing
renderers and editors is simply not acceptable. Particularly when some
of these seem to update very slowly. We can't have thousands of entities
suddenly disappearing off the main mapnik view until, some weeks or
months later, someone gets around to updating the stylesheets.
Putting in place a serious process for tag migration will be difficult.
I suggest that a first step will be definition of an actual schema, with
version number. For example, define an actual list of several hundred
tags, with semantics, that correspond to "OSM core 1.0". Then, we could
have votes on changes to the schema, with advance notice given: "On
November 1, 2011, the main database will be updated to OSM core 1.1.
Please have your editor and renderer patches ready for this date."
Not easy, and I don't think the OSM community is at that level of
process maturity yet.
Steve
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