@Severák,

Technically, https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:*=no is okay in case if default value for this property is yes. It should only be clearly described in Wiki.

But https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:tunnel=no is just an example of bad mapping manner, not of bad tag design. In cases like this one we should probably blame JOSM presets and validation rules for allowing it (and people, who put every tag they know on a simple road, which is quite common manner).

Я-то себе в общих чертах эти вещи представляю. Просто без хотя бы краткого пояснения почему говорить о том, что - выглядит действием ради действия, то есть бессмыслицей. Повторюсь, многие не в курсе.

“Геопространственный” - прямая калька с geospatial, буквально означает, что нечто имеет дело с объектами, находящимися в пространстве (имеющими координаты) и не просто в пространстве, а на Земле. Так что вполне подходит.

@escada,

Research implies learning from results of it. It didn’t happen, so it doesn’t count for research.

Proposal you’ve mentioned doesn’t address any reasonable counterarguments expressed in mail list discussions. People were telling, that https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:leisure=aquatics_centre is redundant, they were telling about the existing way to tag it, however, proposal description doesn’t have a word to explain, why it is important to introduce this new value keeping in mind these counterarguments. Reading these threads in mail list, I’m getting more convinced, that author intentionally ignored everything he had been told and preferred to take his chance by proceeding to proposal procedure.

There are currently two issues with swimming facilities and sport facilities in general:

• swimming_pool exists as a value of two different keys, leisure and amenity
• if you have https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:leisure=pitch, https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:leisure=sports_centre or any other general sport facility, you can’t specifically tell, what sports it’s intended for if there is more than one.

This is a problem. Having specific tag for water sports center with pool doesn’t solve any of these cases.

Может быть, стоило начать с какой-то вводной, “почему нам стоит вообще что-то делать с мультиполигонами”? Куча народу не в курсе.

It seems like useful experience. It’s interesting to read about it, because outside the HOT activity, people (more or less successfully) doing that by themselves. Are you using any automated quality assessment tools to find potential mistakes? I just took a look at Maseru area and there are a lot of objects using name= tag wrongly - trees with “name=Eucalyptus” or buildings with “name=building under construction” which is completely against the good practice of mapping. Overpass API queries can really help to find things like that.

Thank you for another valuable bit of statistics. However, once you’ve got your hands on this sort of data, could you go a bit further and plot some additional graphs: - breakdown of a single year (2015, for example); - accumulated number of people, who have created an account, but didn’t do any contribution within following several months (hard to guess, how many months will make sense to assume that account was abandoned immediately after it was created). It would also be interesting to know, how many users had no edits at all.

@Super-Map,

Those irresponsible people, who prefer to start mapping without getting any familiarity with project guidelines neither read Wiki nor Diaries. iD includes information about any background layer used during editing session, it does understand, if you have used Bing or something else (including manually connected sources). So, please, get some information about it before posting.

Byłoby lepiej spytać tutaj: http://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewforum.php?id=23

@desktop, It does. And mail lists (more than 30 years old technology) does as well. German, Ukrainian and Russian communities successfully using forums for communication, having dedicated topics for particular questions. It’s not ideal (you can’t search within single topic, while it’s pretty common forum engine feature), but much more usable and less annoying (comparing to “threads” in mail lists).

Technically, there is no need to add “source” to every object you have traced in iD, because this editor adds information about used imagery layers to changeset properties automatically.

(Honestly, I don’t understand who is the target group of this diary post.)

Speaking of social presence… There is no way to get updates on comments here in diaries if it’s not your diary entry. A kind of asocial.

@trigpoint, I am aware of these aspects in natural language, but OSM does not use natural language for tagging, that’s why many of these entities making no sense. OSM is a database, and any attempt of using it (for making POI catalog or map index for navigation device) should never require anyone to dig into cultural and linguistic details. That’s why all these malls, supermarkets, shopping centres and so on are really bad for tagging, being highly dependent on cultural context and unclear even for insiders of that culture in the same time.

Could you explain, how exactly it’s harder to tell for “normal” mapper, if tree sheds its foliage in winter and if it has leaves or needles? This is just common myth. Even kids in their five years can easily do that if they don’t have intellectual development problems. Conifer will mean it has been planted for forestry - that’s just beyond any limits of logic, by the way.

@Sanderd17,

Adding more and more values for amenity to reflect local types is exactly that wrong practice this article is talking about. Proper way of tagging food amenities should look like single tag with set of properties. Some sort of (don’t pay too much attention to wording, it’s just an outline):

• amenity=food_place - root tag for all places, where you can eat and/or drink
• food_place:local_type[:language_code]=ftiture/cafe/restaurant/hospoda/столовая - here you can store any “common name” for it, in local language
• food_place:takeaway=yes/no
• food_place:alcohol=yes/no - shows if you can get alcohol drinks
• food_place:seating= - shows if there is free seating, reserved tables or whatever
• food_place:bar=yes/no - shows if there is a bar
• and so on

I repeat, this is not even a draft of tagging scheme, this is just an illustration of principle, so, you don’t have to focus on wording, you should focus on the idea. Technically, it’s possible to combine this scheme with an old-style one for compatibility. But only completely new scheme could be capable to actually describe food amenities instead of making everybody guessing.

@Warin61, There is a problem with building= values. Some people think it should tell us, how this building is used, other people think, it should tell us how it looks/built. This is stupid.

@marczoutendijk,

Thank you, I’ll read your entries today.

Yes, there are lost of big fans of Soviet topographic maps (not including me, because these maps were designed to be cheap, not to be really usable), so you can have certain success with it.

First of all, tags in OSM are abstract values. We could be using numerical codes as well (just like some GIS systems do). But words are used to make it more human-readable. Sometimes it leads to certain confusion, because entities, tagged by certain keys and values, are defined more strictly (or, otherwise, more universally) than words in natural language. Also, it is important to understand, that tagged properties should be close to “atomic”, elementary properties, instead of being combined (compound).

For example, “drinking_water_fountain” is not a good choice at all, because it reflects at least two (three, actually) properties together: “place, where you can get water”, “that water is drinkable” and “here is a fountain”. So, should we invent another tag, such as “drinking_water_tap” for those places, where they have tap instead of fountain? No, that’s against the concept of core tag and additional tags, intended to add fine details.

Proper scheme should include several tags: one for a place, where you can get water (core or root tag); another - to denote, if it’s drinkable or not; and further tags to tell, if it’s a tap, fountain, open pipe or whatever. It allows to tag everything in flexible manner, adding or removing properties independently. It also allows simple querying of data by single tag instead of using list of them (one for every kind of drinking water source).

Remember, OSM is not a map, it’s geodatabase, which goes beyond the typical set of capabilities, associated with digital map.

@Warin61,

Only static measurements, taken in open field with open sky, have true natural distribution of position around the true point. Factors such as movement with constant speed, permanent obstacles (buildings, walls) will always lead to constant error in addition to stochastic distribution.

Talking about real accuracy and precision of own tracks makes sense only in case if you have precision reference data (fine scale map, for example) to compare. Otherwise, you can only talk about estimated error (derived from DOP, which is also an estimated value).

@seav, That is great to hear.

@Hjart, Much better compared with what? Comparison of several tracks having unknown precision is useless from the point of metrology. Indeed, some obviously bad features like sudden jumps in one track and lack of them in another can make people thinking that smoother track is better, but technically, smoothness means nothing, as you can clearly see on illustration above - all tracks with significant constant shift look smooth.

But thank you anyway for mentioning Strava tracks.

@SimonPoole, I’m always reading everything carefully, but sometimes people are, hmm… quite polite, and it makes me a bit confused about what they actually mean. If you agree with my point, it’s great. Speaking of openstreetmap.org frontpage - currently it does make an impression, that interactive map is the primary product of OSM (and people are always comparing it to Google Maps and other services), while German frontpage, which looks similar to national geoportal websites of many European countries, has certain message to visitors, telling about the project behind the default map style.

But, being agree with importance of telling people how OSM actually works, could you write a couple of lines regarding those changes on /About OpenStreetMap:Talk page? Because it seems like Mr. Harry Wood have monopolized this page.