> On May 16, 2015, at 10:29 PM, pmailkeey . <pmailk...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> 
> Thanks for the post, John.
> 

Thanks for reading ^^

> I think the problem is the tagging method. Why does there have to be two 
> parts to it ?

beyond necessary database syntax (key=value), This is a flat vs hierarchical 
question.  Do we have Education=school / school=elementary or just 
school=elemntary by itself?

There is data to be gleaned from the hierarchical approach - it is an education 
facility. It is not a private tutoring shop. it is a member of other similar 
facilities in education (Junior high, High, University, etc). 

In some cases the more complicated method makes it easier to find what is in a 
category, such as a top level tag holds all the building types (building=shop) 
and then shop holds all the different shop types (shop=groomer). and we can 
then create an additional tag (groomer=poodle_groomer) if we need to add more 
information. And the debate rages on if it should be that or 
shop:groomer=poodle or similar - but that still is a hierarchy of information. 

building=poodle_groomer contains less information and is less easily understood 
by mappers and renderers. 

> 
> Landuse=schoolgrounds is the same as schoolgrounds. Natural=forest is the 
> same as simply forest.

key=value. 

so..  schoolgrounds=yes? 

> 
> How about:
> 
> Forest=natural ?

isn’t that natural=wood?

> 
> or forest=man_made ? [=plantation or somesuch term for a human-planted 
> forest].

A forest is a man-altered area, so i believe “forest” already implies man-used. 
But it is not man_made (as a building is), as the forest is not a non-building 
structure. 
> 
> landuse=school is, to the map, the same as 
> area=school which is the same as

Area is the name for a type of unit in the database (node, way, area) so that 
sounds confusing. so how about using land=school for your example. 

> "school" or perhaps
> school=primary
> school=secondary
> school=music

When I have a facility  which encompasses multiple buildings with different 
purposes (a music school , a computer school, a sports facility, etc) and that 
entire facility is considered a “school” with a singular name (FooBar 
university), there has to be some kind of *generic purpose-based tag* for the 
area. that is how I see landuse=* . You can reimagine it to have other names, 
or other tagging styles, but eventually you will lead yourself to 
purpose=education because if you go much narrower, the world is so varied that 
the 6 categories you need don’t quite line up with the 6 I need, and the 12 
someone else needs - so to have a single catch all is much more flexible. Maybe 
we can agree on some age splits (Pre K-12 , higher) but if you start going 
deeper than that - what about combined primary-secondary? what about combined 
secondary-high? What about a facility that does K-12 all on the same campus? 
making 35 different tags is not helpful to get taggers tagging and renderers 
rendering. 

my fictional tag example

landuse=school  [currently amenity=school]
school=k-12
k-12=secondary;high
religion=buddhist
denomination=honen
Name=FooBar Buddhist Junior & Senior High School
secondary=3
high_school=3

vs

land=honen_buddhist_secondary_high_school

This basic hierarchical approach makes it easy to support new users (unless 
everything is abstracted away, which it is totally not) and Major things to be 
supported by renderers (which are really really conservative) so we get the 
best of all worlds for a large amount of things that can fit easily into some 
big catch-all category, and still have it refined by the subtags for further 
use . 

All the renderers need to see is “ landuse=school “ and I get my render. The 
rest is for completeness’ sake. 

imagine the values needed to support land=* in your scheme. land=* would have 
hundreds of unrelated types of areas all jammed together. there is no split to 
them for parsing or rendering.

and any new value would have to be supported by updating all the renderers. 

I can create a new value of k-12= and nothing needs to be changed, until 
support for rendering the k-12 tag is supported later. 

> 
> The big point is what does 'landuse' (or 'natural') tell us that's new 
> information

landuse can be read as “purpose”

Natural can be read as “existing in the world with little to no alteration by 
man."


> ? bridge=natural would be a case where natural is giving information as it is 
> not expected bridges to be natural.

a natural bridge (like a rock crossing a chasm) sounds cool. 
> 
> Can you find a sports pitch that's not landuse ? there's no need to have 
> landuse=sports_pitch. And to prove my point, OSM doesn't ! we have instead 
> leisure=sports_pitch - but it's still landuse but not tagged as such. So now, 
> it seems OSM tags landuse on its own whims, is inconsistent; is confusing

A commercial sports facility would have a landuse encompassing all the pitches, 
parking lots, and other buildings (leisure=sports_center) that make up FooBar 
Sports Center. 

landuse=commercial (i think) 
name:foobar Sports Center
sport=multi

I could see there being a landuse=recreation or leisure, but we have chosen to 
define a lot of land uses by economic means (commercial, industrial, 
residential, agriculture, etc).

This lack of completeness in landuse (there is no landuse=civic yet, I’m 
pushing for it) would help solve some issues, IMO.

Very specific landuses (landuse=poodle_training_ground) sounds really bad to 
me. there are some which should have been sub-keys (like farmland+crop) but no 
one was looking that far ahead, such as 

landuse=farmland now instead of landuse=agriculture and agriculture=* would be 
better, rather than trying to get rendering support for more esoteric landuse 
values (like greenhouse_horticulture).

> 
> landuse=golf_course
> leisure+golf_course
(bad syntax)
> man_made=golf_course



landuse=commerical (private business, as opposed to a city operated course, or 
a company that um.. sells golf courses ^^)

something something =sports facility 

sport=golf 

golf courses are not a non-building structure (like a dam or a tower) so it is 
not in man_made

golf=foobar (as there is so, so, much defined about golf courses). 

how and where we slice the “sports facility” pie - there are thousands of golf 
courses all over each country, so they might warrant their own tag - is up to 
how tag definers care to define it. 

The die-hard golf course taggers can hide all their esoteric crap inside golf= 
so a regular joe can tag the facility without understanding traps and roughs 
and fairways and whatever. 

This scheme makes support for rendering “sports facilities” or “golf courses” 
much easier - rather than all the esoteric course types that could fill up a 
tag space. 

> 
> Surely all three of these are 'obvious' when referring to a golf course ? If 
> they're not the obvious - then tag differently: golf_course=electronic.

this should merely be a value of golf=*  (golf=virtual_golf?) 


building=yes
sport=golf
golf=virtual_golf  (used for practicing swings in an indoor and very space 
limited area while being immersed in a virtual play field). 

Maybe, but once you start cutting up the pie into different sections, you can't 
slice the same pie two different ways, so we need to make decisions. And these 
are all sub-optimized organically made community decisions - and some people 
see a great value in that. 

> 
> OSM tagging is not logical. Does it need to be ? no, but it would help if it 
> was.

I think we are both seeing incompleteness in the tagging schema because it was 
made organically, and we both want to complete the sections that our mind most 
easily latches onto to make OSM better - but there are good and bad points to 
each way, and because of the multitude of people, the only way to change OSM is 
one tag at a time - which is frustrating, but the “grand retagging” schemes are 
all doomed to failure, even if we are not opposed to them.

Please remember syntax is important as well - and I think language influences 
this a lot - how we define the world is related to our language. and OSM is 
filed with different taggers from different languages.

"I want to go to that restaurant."  would be “I = that restaurant to gowant. “  
(私 は あの レストラン に 行きたい。)  in Japanese.  Note “want" is stuck on the verb.

How Japanese people would make OSM syntax and tag categories would (probably) 
be very different - so we will always have this battle. 

Javbw
_______________________________________________
Tagging mailing list
Tagging@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging

Reply via email to