Proposal

A proposal is a suggestion how to model a real-world situation (so-called "feature") in the data model of OpenStreetMap. Some proposals just include a single tag, but others include a scheme consisting of multiple tags and elements.

The creation of a proposal usually follows the defined proposal process although this is not mandatory. This process makes use of a wiki page featuring the draft and an ongoing discussion over various communication channels (taggingopenstreetmap.org is the dedicated mailing list). The draft might be updated during the discussion which in turn leads to a voting about the proposal. The concepts of approved proposals are referred to as approved features.

Apart from creating a proposal, every user can create a new tagging-scheme without any proposal. Users are encouraged to document their tags in this wiki.

Advantages of proposals

• You will get feedback from fellow mappers.
• You can avoid creating a new schema for something you did not know before.
• You have the option to refine the meaning of a tag compared to a previous definition.
• Voting provides you with some measure of community agreement, but please remember that this does not justify automated edits by itself.

Disadvantages of proposals

• Proposals are usually formulated in English what is a barrier for people from countries where English is foreign language
• Votes in the proposal process are not necessarily representative for all mappers (current total number of contributors: more than ten million)
• Discussions can become lengthy and off-topic.
• Country-specific tagging and conventions might hinder your ideas (especially if those are not well documented).

Dealing with abandoned drafts

Apart from many approved proposals, this wiki also contains drafts of proposals or abandoned ones that were never voted on. Some users argue that these should be deleted to focus the wiki on currently used content while others argue that all proposals should be kept for documentation.

See also

Lists of proposals

• Full list of proposals including status, date, name and authors - and https://weeklyosm.eu/ mentions proposal voted on, approved, rejected and entering RFC during given week
• Proposed features
  • by stage
    • Proposals under way  –  includes proposals with status "In use", "Draft", "Proposed" and "Voting"
    • Active proposals  –  includes proposals with status "Approved"
  • by status
    • Category:Proposals by status
      • For example Category:Proposals with "Voting" status
• Inactive proposals
  • Status abandoned
  • Status canceled
  • Status obsoleted
  • Status rejected
  • Status undefined
• All proposals regardless of status

additional:

• List all pages in Proposed feature(s)
• List all pages in Proposal:

Weblinks

Syntactic conventions for new tags

overview of conventions for naming and encoding

Good practice

general guidelines about mapping

Tagging guidelines by country

overview of more specific guidelines