Proposal talk:Culture
Taxonomy should not be inserted into the database
The whole idea of "namespaces" like amenity, tourism, culture etc. is actually taxonomy in disguise. Discussing whether a museum should be tagged as amenity=museum, tourism=museum or culture=museum does not change the basic fact that that particular POI is simply a "museum".
We could later argue whether museums are amenities, culture items or something else but this discussion should not belong to geographic data themselves
Let me be clear: I hate the current division between amenity= and tourism=. But we are not discussing that. We are discussing whether we should introduce a third, or fourth, "namespace". And I strongly oppose this.
For instance: are nightclub "culture" or "amenities"? We could argue that this depends on our own "culture": if I oppose nightclubs on religious grounds, I could very well say that they are not "cultural" at all! But I would still acknowledge that a particular POI is, in fact, a nightclub. FedericoCozzi 12:06, 8 November 2010 (UTC)
- While I agree with the general statement that "the OSM database needs not contain a taxonomy", I can very well accept the fact that — for mappers (i.e. I am not speaking of semantics here) — a better categorization of tags is helping newbies memorizing tags. And some forgetful individuals like myself, who keep forgetting if a "fire_hydrant" is an amenity or not. In some places it may even help stylesheets filtering out a certain category of POIs, but that's secondary. On the other hand, I don't currently see a point where a culture "namespace" would hurt the database. I can live with or without a change. Kay D 13:31, 8 November 2010 (UTC)
- I see your point, but be careful: if the categorization is not fully agreed upon, we will end with two different tags with slightly different semantics. Let's suppose that culture=nightclub get passed with a slim majority: some people could argue that we now have two different nightclubs, those that are "cultural" and those that aren't. Something similar almost happened with shop=ice_cream vs amenity=ice_cream: someone argues that there is a difference between the two, and that they have different semantics. If this happened to the "culture" key, you could forget your dream of "better categorization": you would now face two slightly different tags, for two slightly different POIs. FedericoCozzi 16:14, 22 December 2010 (UTC)