W dniu 15.05.2015 13:02, pmailkeey . napisał(a):
My concern is that OSM is/should be open to all. For it to succeed at
that, it needs to be easily understood by all - but even I would
+1 - I couldn't agree more!
10+ years of just adding more types of objects makes a lot of unneeded
cruft, because we try to fit everything in the initial scheme of things
(which is too narrow and rigid now). If it's just adding more details,
we succeeded (in general), but when the problem is finding the right
categorization, we tend to fail.
And note, that it's hard for us, advanced mappers! But I guess this
project has a long tail - that means advanced users are just a tiny
(even if important) part of community. So most of the work is done by
casual mappers. They have iD as a tool and that's great, but if
something is more complicated than just adding very typical objects,
they probably got lost with Wiki subtleties, overlapping definitions and
language/cultural differences.
We need as low common denominators as possible to be useful for those
casual users. Otherwise we will loose the opportunities (available data
not entered, users distracted) or we will gain random errors (data
entered anyway just to fit in our scheme or - even worse - for
rendering).
It is never "too late" to change the project until the last user is gone
or the project have stalled (it's quite the reverse in OSM today =} ).
It can be hard, but for me general tagging schemes cleaning/simplifying
has great advantages for casual (easy tagging the ground truth) and
advanced users as well (lightweight, more flexible categories, tag
schemes become manageable again, Wiki is not overloaded with
inconclusive voting cases, because the rules are more flexible and
clear).
struggle to define 'amenity' - it's not a familiar word to most people
and it's a problem osm-wide with nomenclature like 'node' for point
and 'way' for line - which I have 98% doubts about it even being
correct.
Speaking of language/cultural differences: even I don't know how to tag
"higher schools" in Poland - as universities or colleges maybe - because
"further/continuing education" idea is simply not used here, but we have
no common "university, college etc" tag.
My conclusion is that landuse = area and area = landuse. Area is
simpler to understand - I can "Draw an area" - if such a category is
really necessary - after all, the fact an area is drawn confirms it's
an area without the need to tag it as such (landuse/area).
Landuse is probably always the area (we just may not know the borders
and make it a node for a closer examination later), but not all areas
are landuse. =} It can be landcover as well - you don't know what's the
use, but you can see what is on the ground (for example grass in the
park: you know what is the use of park, but grass here has no clear
meaning). Also some people argue that landuse=water makes no sense and I
think they are right. =}
I think "area" tag is the most useful and generic term for all these
objects and should be used this way. The practical implementation is not
set in stone, it can be for example:
1. area=landuse+landuse=park
2. area:landuse=park
3. area=water+water=pond
4. area=pond
5. pond=yes
I strongly prefer shorter ones, with no encapsulated categories (since
we may want to change it later if needed - see the categories on
Wikipedia), but anything is better than current state of confusion.
--
"The train is always on time / The trick is to be ready to put your bags
down" [A. Cohen]
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