[HOT] Regional highway tag values | Re: Thank you from MSF!

[Kevin McPherson]

Thanks Rory

There are somegeneric guidelines on how to do tagging, e.g.

Highway Tag -OpenStreetMap Wiki 

HighwayTag Africa - OpenStreetMap Wiki 

and additionally there may be somemore country-specific guidelines (I’ve found the following so far, some as aresult of replies from contributors over the past week or so):

HighwayTag Afghanistan - OpenStreetMap Wiki 

HighwayTag East Africa Tagging - OpenStreetMap Wiki 

HighwayTag Ghana Road Network - OpenStreetMap Wiki 

HighwayTag India:- OpenStreetMap Wiki 

HighwayTag Malawi - OpenStreetMap Wiki 

HighwayTag Namibia - OpenStreetMap Wiki 

Highway TagNepal/Roads - OpenStreetMap Wiki 

HighwayTag Philippines Guidelines - OpenStreetMap Wiki 

HighwayTag South Africa - OpenStreetMap Wiki 

The following list contains anadditional 30 or so countries (some of which are included above, but not all),so there doesn’t seem to be a definitive list of how countries tag their ownclassifications:

                              https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tagging

They’re all similar, but can besubtly different.

In any event, I haven’t found asingle, definitive page of how countries tag their highways yet, but amconsolidating one!

    On Friday, April 12, 2019, 1:41:24 PM GMT+1, Rory McCann <rory at technomancy.org> wrote:  
 
 On 07/04/2019 18:59, Kevin McPherson via HOT wrote:
> Dear all, I am new to this HOT interface on OSM, but joined last week, 
> and interested in road classification in OSM. This is my first posting, 
> and first time I have engaged with anyone on OSM, so am still getting up 
> to speed.

Welcome to OSM!

> With regards to OSM, one issue is that the <highway> tag in OSM is never 
> quite the same as the official definition of the country. For example, 
> the highway tag:
> 
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:highway
> 
> uses "Motorway", "Trunk", "Primary", "Secondary" etc. while a national 
> roads agency might use other terminology such as "Main", "District", 
> "Local" etc.

That is certainly something that can be confusing at first. Although OSM
tags/keys/values are written in English ("highway"), it's better to not
"read" them and pretend they are just opaque computer codes, which you
'translate' into your own local language, or region specific thing.
Rather than reading highway=trunk, pretend it says uvtujnl=gehax. In the
USA "highway" means something different, so it can be confusing, but if
you just think "What does uvtujnl mean in my country/region?", A British
person translates it as "highway", an American "street", a German
"Straße" etc. Then, rather than seeing "trunk", see "gehax", and ask
what that means in your language/place.

The OSM wiki has a big list of how to translate each highway value into
regional equivalents:
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Highway:International_equivalence

In Ireland, we have highway=trunk for "National Primary",
highway=primary for "National Secondary", highway=secondary "Regional",
highway=tertiary "(low numbered) Local", and highway=unclassified for
the rest.

The local community for each country should decide on such a
"translation", and then use that. Write that in the wiki and talk to
OSMers to tell them. (I wonder if iD's regional specific translations
might be useful here (e.g. to translate "highway=trunk" in en_IE to
"National Primary"... 🤔)

I hope that helps.

Rory


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