W dniu 13.05.2015 18:24, Bryce Nesbitt napisał(a):
On Wed, May 13, 2015 at 1:46 AM, Martin Koppenhoefer
<dieterdre...@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm not convinced that such a generic approach will help to get
unambiguous tagging, e.g.
children + education + building (= school building) ->
architectural school? language school? ...
vehicle + education (= driving school) -> self learning autonomous
vehicles? school bus? a bus that offers educational services? ...
area + tree (= forest/wood) -> a big tree? an area foreseen for
trees? an orchard? ...
building + sleep (= hotel/hostel/...) -> a motel? a dormitory? a
matress factory? ...
+1 well illustrated
Oh, so it have sounded like I disagree with current ability to go down
into details? Sorry for that! =} My intention was not to get rid of them
and have _only_ the basics, but to be able to have _better_ (=more
general/universal/"basic") basics.
I have to admit: we're damn good at details, but it's much easier to
extend them than to upgrade the generalities. And that's why we can
describe very complex properties, but we're unable to use proper
categories with general/specific relations between the objects.
For example we know the natural=forest and natural=wood have something
in common, but we have no tools to show how they relate to each other
(natural=* is just too broad) nor to let mappers describe general tree
area when needed (natural=trees + area=yes alone would do, but that's
another "case" to remember with different wording, not resembling
"forest" nor "wood").
The hierarchy approach sidesteps some of that
building
what type of building?
BTW: building is actually a great example of right basics we already
have. It is general enough to say building=yes and it's useful, but we
may narrow it down if needed - so it works as advertised. =}
But I think it better to go the other way. Start with the "duck":
driving_school
driving school + private_vehicle + fee = things open to
the general public, services, things you book in advance
driving school + heavy goods vehicle+ fee = services,
specialty services
Which other than the categories, pretty much is the wiki of today.
OK, but driving school is not the most basic object around we can find
(even the name reveals that it's a complex object!), so we still have no
tools for proper categorization from the top. We have to start from the
middle (keys like natural, amenity etc) and we need a lot of objects.
In other words, this example doesn't change anything, that's what we
have now: we still rule at details and suck at generics.
***
Just today I've learned about linguistic theory called "natural semantic
metalanguage" (NSM) and this is exactly what I think we need to make the
tagging system sane and easy to navigate. The "bricks" will be
different, because we focus on geospatial informations only, but the
rule is the same - they have to be as elementary as it gets:
"An explication is a breakdown of a non-prime concept into prime ones.
E.g., Someone X killed someone Y:
someone X did something to someone else Y
because of this, something happened to Y at the same time
because of this, something happened to Y's body
because of this, after this Y was not living anymore"
[
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_semantic_metalanguage#Explication
]
This form is probably not very useful for small talk =} , but it has
some big advantages: we need only tiny vocabulary to tell everything and
the objects do not overlap.
And this is a problem with existing tag set and Wiki today - many of our
basics are not that basic really and the vocabulary is so big, that we
have to check a lot of things. Let alone casual mappers...
***
I hope this time my message will be more clear:
1. Everything is well with how we describe detailed properties and I see
no need to touch it.
2. At the same time we have serious problems with general objects
classification rules (incompleteness, overlapping) and generic tag
overload.
3. That result is once you have the right tagging scheme, you're safe,
but finding it can be hard or impossible. Another consequence: Wiki is
no longer just a helpful documentation, but the only way to manage
everything at all, and so its' importance is overstated and
misunderstood (hence countless discussions about "approved" tag schemes
as if it's "official" somehow).
4. We can still use complex ideas like "supermarket" or "driving
school", because they're shorter way of describing things, but if they
prove to be too complex, we have tools to express it anyway - easy and
according to existing rules.
--
"The train is always on time / The trick is to be ready to put your bags
down" [A. Cohen]
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