At the moment one needs to examine many files (styles, strings, categories, editor and all over c++ sources) to be able to say how a particular OSM tag is used in OM, whether its drawable, searchable etc.

It makes validation hard and we often forget to add a particular "trait" (like category search) to newly added tags.
Also we have a lot of hardcoded behavior for cases like cuisine, wheelchair (not drawable), "OM-invented" tags like hwtag, etc.

The idea is to make those traits configured more explicitly in the OSM tags mapping config file (atm its data/mapcss-mapping.csv).

• a good overview of each tag usage (easy to spot mistakes, inconsistencies, easier validation..)
• easier for the generator to decide what kind of data to include for a tag, whether to put into the search index, etc (less hardcoded logic)

Possible "traits":

• drawable (or non-drawable)
• searchable
• searchable by category
• translatable
• acceptable geom types
• "generated" or "internal" (hwtag, city= ...)
• attributes or secondary tags supported by the main one
• editable
• "special" (implies there is unobvious hardcoded behavior)

The current csv format is not suitable for it, we can migrate to e.g. yaml.
Extended multi-line syntax will allow to also e.g. get rid of replaced_tags.txt.

Related:

• #5436
• #1312