OpenStreetMap doesn’t allow multiple tags with the same tag key. But there is a believe out there in OSM land, that you can work around this by putting all the tag values you want into one tag using semicolons as separator characters. So if there is a bank with an ATM machine, people tag [amenity=bank;atm]. Or there is a road with several refs, then they tag them as [ref=I 70;US 40] and hope that it will magically work. And it does work in some cases. But in many cases it doesn’t. Let’s look into this a bit.

On the weekend there was (again) a discussion on the German OpenStreetMap mailinglist about how the system of coming up with new OSM tags and better defining existing tags could be improved (or whether it actually needs improving). This is a difficult subject. The “system” (for lack of a better word) is confusing and often leads to frustration. But it does basically work. OSM is growing, people are entering more and different kinds of data, usable maps are produced, finding routes based on OSM data works.