On Jun 23, 2023, at 7:12 AM, Greg Troxel <g...@lexort.com> wrote: > English varies by country and sometimes we can't understand each other. > Changing semantics by regional English is no more reasonable than changing by > other language word collisions. My point is that a tag defines a semantic > concept and that we should strive to have it mean that concept everywhere. > That is the point, so that data consumers can use it.
Going "meta about this," OSM and OSM in the USA experienced similar pain (and we still do, due to the legacy tagging that hasn't yet been fully cleaned up) with leisure=park. In US English, "park" is a widely encompassing word that can include many recreational areas which have a far wider semantic than the very specific (urban, "manicured human space") meant by leisure=park. With some pain (it lingers) OSM in the USA had to "suck it up" (deal with the reality of leisure=park having a specific meaning in OSM, even if that meaning is seriously restricted in a US English context). Similar things are going on here with guns / firearms, and part of the reason this thread lingers is because the issue (for guns, firearms...) remains in both people's minds (who might tag in OSM), various dialects of English and regions where guns (or firearms...) are sold. These don't align, we struggle with this, as we don't know how to align them in our tagging. Yes, we want data consumers to use the tag(s). It may be OSM simply has to struggle through (as we do with leisure=park meaning one thing, boundary=national_park meaning another, boundary=protected_area or perhaps leisure=nature_reserve, if that is true, meaning another...) the not-necessarily-consistent semantics of gun/firearm shops with various, still-emerging potentially difficult syntax markers, which don't yet seem to be agreed upon, to denote them. We don't have to stay "meta about this" any longer than necessary (and can end it here), but it can help to see things like this. _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
