Answering the question, What should I tag this feature?, is one of the most important and at times irreconcilable problems faced by OSM mappers.

Whether it manifests through the ‘building=yes’ phenomenon, colorful correspondences between OSM contributors about best tagging practices, or the many community-driven efforts and software tools made to validate problematic feature tagging, this grey area is pervasive and has consequences.

MapRules, an API service and web interface for creating and sharing reusable presets and validation rules, hopes to solve these problems. It simplifies OSM’s tagging conundrum, reduces the barrier to entry for new mappers, promotes mappers to actively self-validate their work, and hopefully can be a happy medium between OSM’s conventional tagging schema and something more standardized.

This talk will detail identified pain points that motivate MapRules, how the tool works under the hood, and of course a live demonstration!