W dniu 12.05.2015 21:50, Michał Brzozowski napisał(a):

1) Don't reinvent the wheel. See how "competitors" have tackled a
problem (Gonna elaborate very widely on that when I'll have enough
examples and time to write).

I don't know the competition and I'm curious how do they deal with it. After all it's not that easy, because we try to cover the whole planet and it's a very diverse place.

Examples would be great!

2) Tag to users' expectations, not to your definitions. But the
consequence would be a substantial reduction in the mailing list
traffic :-P

I guess what we're trying to do on this list is defining things according to multiple layman points of view.

However you're right: usually from some point discussion just gets deeper and deeper into horrible details because it's easier to invent another "cases" than try to keep things clean, general and user-friendly.

3) Ontology should be simple and rather general. Being too particular
while incomplete is a plague of current shop and services tagging
system.

Not only incomplete, but also overlapping in many cases - which is even worse, because you can always fill the missing place, but it's much harder to redefine already used tagging schemes and narrow down definitions (BTW: that seems to be exactly the problem with confectionery etc.).

***

I had the same intuition lately and that's what I said on the Talk list about how should good tagging system look like:

1. It should be more uniform (like "amenity=school" -> "landuse=school"
for the school areas).

2. It should be more cascading/hierarchical (like in
"construction=highway + highway=service + service=parking_aisle").

3. It should be more granular (no more
"amenity=green_poodle_with_6_legs", just because it's a very common
case! Rather "amenity=poodle + colour=green + legs=6").

4. It should allow mixing different forms and functions (like in
"building=church + amenity=place_of_worship", because they can be
disconnected, like "building=church + tourism=museum").

5. It should treat parallel types of objects as first class citizens
(kind of "amenity=police + amenity=school" for police academy should be
possible, since this amenity is equally a teaching place _and_ a police
place - the same for multiple names: we can make it "name=A;B" if really
needed, but the semicolon is our last resort and there's no consensus if
we should use numbering schemes like "name1=A + name2=B" or "name:1=A +
name:2=B" instead).

[ https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2015-March/072349.html ]

In my opinion current tagging system fails especially at 3. - it is not granular enough and I see no way of repairing it directly. So I invented the idea of smaller, more universal "bricks" like:

- area
- food
- drink
- sweet
- sleep
- children
- education
- service
- religion
- building
- shop
- railway
- bus
- vehicle
- home
- art

...and so on. Remember, this is just an illustration of the problem, not the final list! This new "vocabulary" should be created by carefully analyzing, generalizing and extracting from current system to re-implement the knowledge we use now. Then we should be able to construct things like:

children + education + building (= school building)
vehicle + education (= driving school)
area + tree (= forest/wood)
building + sleep (= hotel/hostel/...)

and many more much easier, avoiding too much overlapping and letting things be general when needed or when the mapper can not be sure. If we made also the ontology tree for this vocabulary (like "children is kind of person" and "bus is a vehicle"), we could have sane, granular and extendable system. Wiki would no longer be the fat, necessary phone book like it's now, because it would be easier to remember the system and to extend them according to the rules.

To make the transition as smooth as possible, we could establish that some new combinations are "reserved" for old objects (like "children + education" is exactly "amenity=school").

Of course it's all just general sketch to be refined and examined. I wrote more about this idea in this post:

https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2015-March/072375.html

I know it looks like a big task, but I see no shorter way to achieve better coherency and usability of our tagging system in the long run.

--
"The train is always on time / The trick is to be ready to put your bags down" [A. Cohen]

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