Dive site tags [was: IMPORTANT information about current master: dive site management]

[Dirk Hohndel]

On Sun, Feb 15, 2015 at 11:19:50AM +0100, Davide DB wrote:
> 
> My user opinion:
> 
> Reverse geocoding YES
> Dive site tags ABSOLUTELY NO
> 
> We cannot use TAGs for everything. Tags were invented for folksnomies
> not  taxonomies.
> 
> Country/State/Place is a taxonomy.

Yes. And as many people have pointed out there will not be a location
taxonomy. Not in a project that I maintain.

But I understand that there are otherwise very reasonable people who
really want to be able to track Country/State/Place of their dives.
So adding tags is an excellent way to do just that.

One person can track certain aspects of the site in tags (say, shore,
boat, wreck, cave). Other people can use the tags as a poor man's
implementation of a taxonomy. Or you can do both.

As I'm writing this, I'm wondering... should tags for a site be
automagically shown as part of the tags of any dive at this site?
So if you mark a site as "shore" then any dive at that site is a shore
dive? I think that would be very convenient...
And it means that we can very easily extend the filter function to cover
things like "search for all my dives in Sweden" (hint: ZERO).

> Dive site structure should be just a (optional***) text field above
> the main dive site location got from GPS and eventually from online
> dive site database or user edit.
> 
> (***) Under geolocation settings prefs. users have the opportunity to
> enable/disable the dive site structure field and if enabled location
> structure is managed by geolocation format chosen by user preferences:
> 
> country
> country/place
> country/state/place

This is the problem with taxonomies. Now we are starting to create
structure. I know at least on diver who always tracks the body of water. I
know another one who for reasons I cannot explain tracks the county.

I don't want to try to create a taxonomy that makes every one happy. I
don't want to have to think about the data structure below that. I don't
want to think about the insanity of trying to import from different data
formats.

With tags we can simply have a drop down that allows the user to pick the
separator and have each of the components that get added to the site name
be parsed out into tags. And then the user can filter for that, do
statistics on that, etc.

> Hence location structure text field IS NOT user editable: everything
> is taken from GPS point in a reliable manner (I agree with Linus on
> GPS point).

And I disagree on that. GPS reverse lookup is nice - but many sites have
no GPS. I have a ton of old sites in my dive log before I started tracking
GPS locations. I have no intention of faking the GPS points, nor do I want
to be excluded from having these sites tracked.

> Regarding localization I'm not a cartographer nor I ever played with
> Google or OpenStreetMap reverse geolocation API but I suppose that
> should be a way to control localization: Right now setting Subsurface
> in Italian language I see all places in Italian language but countries
> are always in English. I see Italy and not Italia regardless of my
> language settings. I do not know if Subsurface indicates any locale to
> Marble map either...

That's odd. I tried with German and French and the countries were returned
in the UI language. I wonder why they were returned in English for you...

> But again please do not mess everything with tags that was invented
> for Folksnomies not  taxonomies.
> 
> Country/State/Place is a taxsonomy.

Not in Subsurface.

/D