[stevage]

In the first part of the article I was thinking, oh, maybe Steve Coast isn't such a jerk after all.

Then I got to the meat of it. Oh dear.

As one of the many many people who has had to deal with OSM data, I curse people with this attitude that the mess is somehow desirable or necessary. It's not. There is a long spectrum between totally free form and completely constrained, and OSM's data model is painfully down the wrong end, and causes enormous harm to all kinds of potential reuses of the data.

It also causes harm to the people creating data. Try adding bike paths and figuring out what tags are appropriate in your area. Try working out how to tag different kinds of parks, or which sorts of administrative boundaries should be added or how they should be maintained. It puts many people off, me included.

Bah.

[delusional]

I tend to agree with you, having done a fair bit of cursing at the OSM format as well.

Yet they've made an open source map, and I haven't. The data tells me that I'm wrong.

[maxerickson]

For a crowd sourced dataset, a strict ontology anyway wouldn't work. Instead of messy tag definitions you'd have tag use that didn't align with the definitions.

I don't mean that as an argument against improving the tagging!

The biggest friction point is probably that people resist rationalization of tagging schemes that have demonstrated themselves to be problematic.

The tagging system in the iD editor tries to address the issue, supporting search terms and suggesting related tags and so on.

The article is more about the underlying storage of the geometries (I don't think there is the same level of interest in changing the basic approach to tagging/categorization).

[stevage]

> For a crowd sourced dataset, a strict ontology anyway wouldn't work. Instead of messy tag definitions you'd have tag use that didn't align with the definitions.

I don't really agree. Wikipedia has clearly defined categories (with a very deep hierarchy), and they make it work. There is constant effort in recategorising, but there are tools to support it. No one is saying "oh, just tag stuff however the hell you feel like it".

> The tagging system in the iD editor tries to address the issue, supporting search terms and suggesting related tags and so on.

It also introduces problems in that it takes a particular interpretation of each tag which isn't necessarily right everywhere. Like calling highway=track an "unmaintained track road", where this concept of "unmaintained" doesn't come from the wiki anywhere - they just seem to have invented it.

>The article is more about the underlying storage of the geometries (I don't think there is the same level of interest in changing the basic approach to tagging/categorization).

There are big issues in this too. Particularly the lack of distinction between line and polygon features, which the consumer is supposed to infer from the tags (building=yes is a polygon, highway=pedestrian is a linestring, a circular walking path), with area=yes used in the most ambiguous cases. Plus all the mess with relations, super-relations etc.

[agumonkey]

Maybe there's a need for bridging app. Something to aid,suggest,review. So people could spend their energy slowly but surely ? an OSMCAD