Hello, first of I'm sorry for a bit longer mail, but this is just another example of what gets me worried about the future of OSM.
This thread is another one of those, where someone came to discuss a specific problem and proposed a solution, a solution that changes a few old things. I fear that it will end as usual - a lot of mails back and forth, and in the end no real answer to the initial problem. What worries me is that very often in threads like this, two "arguments" and their variations against the change come up. 1) You are a bad, because you try to impose your preferences on others. 2) Relations are complex, we should not use them. Now, I'll try to explain, why I think that these are not valid arguments for the discussed topic and should not be used. ad 1) It's not imposing, it's called laying an argument for the proposal. If I (or someone else... I'll stick with the first person from now on) wanted to impose the change on others I would go ahead and apply it wherever I edit right away without discussion. Instead of saying "don't impose your views on others", you should provide an argument why the proposal is bad and ideally, propose alternative solution to the presented problem. This way, I can react with counter-argument, or admit that the original proposal was bad, and after few iterations a real solution can be reached. ad 2) This is actually not an argument against any tagging proposal, but argument for improving relation handling in editors. If we use it to dismiss all tagging proposals, then we're moving in circles - relations won't be used for tagging, even though (in some cases) they provide more flexibility, less error prone and more effective tagging scheme, etc. And editors will never improve the relation editing, because it's not important, because they are not that much used. I don't think the relations are that complicated as some people say, but this is mainly influenced by the fact, that I started editing using Merkaartor (and sticked to it), which has pretty good (although far from perfect) relations visualization and handling. On the other side of the spectrum is Potlach, which makes anything involving relations overly complicated. I've fixed my share of relation bugs, that I dare to say came from these poor editing capabilities. I don't want to step on someone's toes by this claim. Please, don't get me wrong, Potlach is great editor for newbies and even I use it when I want to quickly fix some minor bug, but the relation handling is its obvious weakness. Now, to the question whether the consistency of data is important or not. I think it is and here is why: 1) If by consistency you mean "not contradicting" data, I think it's obvious. We should really aim for minimizing the amount of contradicting data, because such data is (in most cases) simply useless. I don't see any benefit in supporting the creation of contradicting data - If someone sees an error, he should try to fix it, or at least add fixme tag saying something like "I think this is wrong, because XXX." and let someone else fix it instead. 2) If by consistency you mean "doing the same thing the same way across the world", then I would argue that this is generally a good thing as well. Of course, there are some cultural or local differences between regions, and thus the total world consistency is probably impossible. But at least on the most general level, we should try to be as consistent as possible. Such an approach makes things a lot easier for data consumers, so that they don't have to track down all the various tagging schemes for one feature and try to compile it to a consistent presentable result. Things get easier for data producers as well - If a newbie comes with question "How should I tag this feature?", you can give him a clear answer, instead of "Well, it's a kind of mess, you can do it like this, or that, or even that, and some people tag it like this.". (And this is not a hypotethical scenario, I've seen such examples e.g. in our local talk-cz.) And if the newbie comes with arguments why the suggested way, doesn't fit his needs, we can discuss how to improve/change it. The consistency, is tool for maximizing the usefulness of the data, e.g. that's why in Czech Republic we don't use obchod=pekařství, but shop=bakery. Furthermore, please, don't dismiss the proposals just because "this can never work across all regions". Even in such a case it might be useful to discuss it, because maybe somewhere else in the world some other local community tries to solve the same problem. It's not a bad thing if those two communities exchange their views and proposed solutions and try to reach a solution that can be applied in both regions. I don't think it's healthy for OSM, to support the view that local communities should play on their own backyard and right away dismiss any attempts for generalization of their solution to other parts of the world. Unfortunately, this is exactly the impression I'm getting from numerous threads in talk@ or tagging@. The problem of roads tagging, was brought up in talk-cz several times. The problem is that current tagging scheme is semantically wrong - e.g. we have only one primary road number 2, but OSM data says we have several hundreds of them. The same for named residential streets in cities. This causes several problems. It makes it hard for data producers to edit the road, because you have the information about it duplicated over several hundreds of segments. It makes it hard for data consumers to present the data in a meaningful way - e.g. if you split the way, because you want to mark a bridge over a river, afaik all renderers will draw several identical ref shields close to each other, because they see it as three separate highways, not one (as you would like to). And a bonus problem is how to mark a reference number of the bridge? Similar problem is with named residential streets in cities. The outcome of the discussion was basically that the roads with reference numbers and names are abstract features and it would be better to map them that way. And the individual segments should contain only the information like 'this is bridge', 'here the road has 3 lanes', ... This issue was indirectly addressed by http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Relations/Proposed/Group_Relation which basically failed, probably because it was too general proposal. So, we put the idea of abstracting the roads to rest (again). When I see this thread (and others like this) and all the resistance (with little arguments) that any proposed change causes at global OSM level, I'm starting to think that we (in Czech Republic and other communities as well) should simply go ahead and play by our own rules at our own backyard and just ignore the global consistency. And this makes me sad, because this would lead to globally less useful data. Best regards, Petr Morávek PS: Although I'm responding to Frederik's mail (because it provoked me to this long email), it's not meant neither exclusively, nor primarily for him.
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
_______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
