On 23.10.22 21:26 Brian M. Sperlongano wrote:
In my mind, the one thing that has been sorely lacking from this
discussion is a clear articulation of the problem we are trying to solve
here, from both a data producer (mapper) and data consumer (renderer
etc) perspective.
Standardization is crucial for those aspects of our data model that a
data consumer has to design algorithms around. Things like lane mapping,
Conditional Restrictions, the standards for 3d buildings and indoor
mapping, and so on.
When I spend months writing code for working with some aspect of OSM
data, I need a stable foundation to build on. So I want to be reasonably
confident that ...
* changes won't be made casually
* my use case won't be rendered impossible because it is overlooked or
deemed unimportant by someone with different priorities
* there will be efforts to align the data with the new standard in a
timely fashion (no decade-long coexistence of "old" and "new" styles)
* I can easily learn of any changes relevant to me
* I'm preferably even consulted as an expert before changes are made.
At the moment, none of that is the case. It is not at all unheard of for
a mapper to just write things to the wiki that break the core logic and
assumptions of established standards. Or for a descriptivist wiki editor
to discover that some percentage of the database does things differently
and to rewrite the wiki instead of fixing the data. And the only way for
me to prevent or even notice any of that is to watch thousands of wiki
pages for changes (most of which will be formatting noise) and then
attempt to convince the person making the change why it would be a bad idea.
Do I have the perfect solution to achieve that? No. But you asked for
problems to solve, and we will have to deal with those problems if we
want people to confidently invest their time into building more complex
OSM-based software – the kind of software needed to match the features
that our competitors are already rolling out.
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