3 ms·

Remember Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names [1]. The amount of trouble people from across the world have had with tech, because some SWE in Silicon Vall

Remember Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names [1]. The amount of trouble people from across the world have had with tech, because some SWE in Silicon Valley decided that the way their names work is how everyone's names in the world work. [1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

matheusmoreira 3y ago
I'm very aware of those issues. My full name has four words, it does not fit into first/last name fields. I have to deal with that problem constantly. I'm reminded of it every single time I pay for something with a credit card due to their idiotic first/last name fields. Some of them even have length limits. This is a non-issue with Open Street Map. Tags are freeform. You can input literally anything into the database. You can have simple tags or ridiculously detailed and nested schemas, and values can be literally any text. You can and should seek community consensus so that a controlled vocabulary can be created and documented, effectively turning it into an API. It's not actually required though. If you have geospatial information and you add it to the map, the map is made richer and more useful than it was before. The map didn't have that data at all and now it does. Doesn't actually matter if the format hasn't been agreed upon yet, it can always be edited later so that it fits into a more regular format. I did a lot of tagging and schema improvements in my city. Software that consumes the Open Street Map dataset obviously won't render the data it doesn't understand. They should be made to understand more stuff. Software can always be updated to make the most of data. The data has to actually be there to be usable though. The software won't matter at all if the data is missing or if it's garbage.

matheusmoreira 3y ago

I'm very aware of those issues. My full name has four words, it does not fit into first/last name fields. I have to deal with that problem constantly. I'm reminded of it every single time I pay for something with a credit card due to their idiotic first/last name fields. Some of them even have length limits. This is a non-issue with Open Street Map. Tags are freeform. You can input literally anything into the database. You can have simple tags or ridiculously detailed and nested schemas, and values can be literally any text. You can and should seek community consensus so that a controlled vocabulary can be created and documented, effectively turning it into an API. It's not actually required though. If you have geospatial information and you add it to the map, the map is made richer and more useful than it was before. The map didn't have that data at all and now it does. Doesn't actually matter if the format hasn't been agreed upon yet, it can always be edited later so that it fits into a more regular format. I did a lot of tagging and schema improvements in my city. Software that consumes the Open Street Map dataset obviously won't render the data it doesn't understand. They should be made to understand more stuff. Software can always be updated to make the most of data. The data has to actually be there to be usable though. The software won't matter at all if the data is missing or if it's garbage.