Lifecycle Tagging

Lifecycle tagging is the representation of the temporal state of an object (e.g., whether it is under construction, demolished, or abandoned). Since there is no single convention universally accepted by the community, different and inconsistent schemes have developed, making automatic interpretation and uniform data management difficult. In many map editors, there is no section dedicated to editing this lifecycle, which makes it even more difficult for new users to understand how to use the system.

The goal of this project is to devise and implement a method for applying lifecycle tagging in a way that is simple, intuitive, and does not interfere with existing tagging practices.

PR can be viewed here.

Study

Before fully committing to the development of a new interface, a study was conducted to assess which tagging schema is the most popular, consistent and suitable for integration into the iD editor. Many other editors have been. Full study available here.

I also tried many of the existing editors and checked how they supported lifecycle editing.

Proposed Standard

• Only six prefixes should be encouraged in order to reduce redundancy, those are: proposed, planned, disused, abandoned, construction and demolished. Other prefixes such as was, razed, obliterated or ruins would still usable but discouraged. This selection was made by choosing the six most used prefixes.
• Construction features would remain a construction = value, since it is widely used and changing every construction-tagged feature to lifecycle would be a difficult and unnecessary switch. Construction tags that use the lifecycle prefix schema are also welcome but not encouraged. As there cannot be two construction = tag, this only applies for the main tag, as a feature can be fully functional with some extra features being under construction or under maintenance (highway = secondary + construction:cycleway = right).
• All other feature types (proposed, abandoned, demolished, exc…) would adopt the lifecycle prefix.
• There won’t be any plan to retag existing entity, as this can bring more harm than good. The introduction of a new user interface should gradually align each entity with the new standard by its own.

Issues

One particular concern for the proposed standard is that it conflicts with what the wiki recommends for some particular presets, some examples includes: * The power line preset prefers to have a construction:powerline approach * Fallen trees whose truncks remain are better marked as razed rather than demolished. One of the proposals that has emerged is for a slow rollout release, limiting it initially to established and well-known presets, such as roads and railways. Only at a later stage, it can be extended to other presets.

To support this rollout approach, the introduction of a system of “customization by preset” was hypothesized, allowing the standard to be adapted according to the specific context. In this way, each preset could use the prefixes best suited to its scope.

New UI

Main features:

• Added a selection list element to edit the main lifecycle state. This will update even if lifecycle tags are manually inputted in the tags section.
• Added an “extra lifecycle” ui section, user can insert any related tag and give them a lifecycle (e.g. proposed:maxspeed = 30). This will update even if lifecycle tags are manually inputted in the tags section.
• Now displays current lifecycle (if any) in the title section and in the icon preset section.

Usability Test

Usability tests were also conducted on two groups of people: expert users and users who were new to the OpenStreetMap workflow. Both groups performed the same seven tasks. Two of these were spaced out to test the learnability of the interface. Task Success Rate and Time On Task were used as an evaluation criteria. As a result, the interface was found to be intuitive, easy to use, and easy to remember; inexperienced users had difficulty understanding the concept of lifecycle tags, rather than using them.

Full Report

This work was also done for my Master Thesis Report. As soon as it is published, I will post a link so you can view the full report.