[OSM-newbies] New country tagging help

[Zeke Farwell]

This is a reason that I think we need to add another tag (worldwide) to our
highways.  The highway tag does a good job of describing the physical nature
of the road, and it often describes the administrative classification as
well.  However it doesn't describe the importance of the road.
In the case of boundaries the OSM community has come up with the admin_level
tag to help with consistent rendering worldwide.  A similar tag could be
created for roads which would basically tell a renderer how important a road
is and at how low of a zoom level it should begin to be rendered.  Some
secondary roads should be rendered at a very low zoom level (if it they are
the most important roads the area), and some motorways should not be
rendered until a very high zoom level (if they are just small spurs or ring
roads).

Donald knows physical/administrative characteristics of the roads in his
area, and can tell the renderer this with the highway tag.  He also knows
the zoom level at which it makes sense for each road to appear, but there is
no way to tell the renderer this information without changing information in
the highway tag.  In my opinion we should not tag a road as 'trunk' for its
importance, even though it is only physically up to 'secondary' standards.

I've been thinking about this for a while and will try to formulate my ideas
into a proposal on the wiki.

Zeke Farwell
Burlington, VT, USA




On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 7:19 AM, Kenneth Gonsalves
<lawgon at thenilgiris.com>wrote:

> On Tuesday 24 March 2009 16:28:13 Donald Campbell II wrote:
> > I don't know.  :-)  I'm having a hard time deciding on really ANY tags.
> >  Can anyone help me out with some sort of strategy for doing this? What's
> > customary for doing a new country?  Do I need to find some sort of
> > government survey map and see how they classify things? What do you do
> when
> > "town" means something different than the established guidelines?
>
> you get to decide since you are the only person tagging - put up a wiki
> page
> and keep describing what you are doing and why. When more people join in,
> the
> debate will be on and a method will appear out of the madness. Here is some
> of
> the discussion we are having in India:
>
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tagging_Roads_in_India
>
> there is no consensus so far, so each person tags his area according to his
> scheme - no open warfare so far too. The important thing is to tag - even
> if
> 'incorrectly' - it can always be changed later. As for roads, you could tag
> them in order of importance - forget 'motorway', use primary, secondary and
> tertiary, and if there is an important enough road, you could have one
> trunk
> road too. There is also a tag called 'hamlet' which is smaller than a
> village.
>
> --
> regards
> kg
> http://lawgon.livejournal.com
>
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>
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