[OSM-newbies] Implicit properties

[Nicholas Shanks]

A post to this list recently stated that highway=footway implied bicycle=no. This surprised me as I had assumed that if a ‘bicycle’ property was not present, then nothing could be assumed as to whether bikes were or were not allowed (and I would assume I could ride my bike there until stopped by a policeman).

After some consideration I decided that I would like Potlatch & JOSM to display, after the explicit properties that I have entered, and a break or on a different background, all the implicit properties that the current properties entail. If I were to then edit one of them, it would move from the implicit list to the explicit list.

How do I bring such a feature to the attention of the Potlatch or JOSM developers?


Here are the modes of transport that I know of which can be applied to a path (with values of designated, yes or no—I don't understand the difference between ‘permissive’ and ‘yes’):
foot
horse
bicycle
motorcar

and some that I've never seen except on the wiki:
wheelchair
motorcycle
motor_vehicle
snowmobile
dogsled
ski
atv (the ESA space cargo vessel?)

So for example, does highway=bridleway imply:
horse=designated, foot=yes, bicycle=yes, everything_else=no?

One would logically assume that highway=steps implies:
foot=yes, ed_209=no, everything_else=no ?

As is often mentioned on http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway%3Dpath/Examples the lack of a specific property can mean either yes or no depending on jurisdiction. The properties that this applies to should be so marked in the editors.

There are hundreds of others I can cite, which are not all ways;
Does highway=street_lamp imply lit=yes?

-- 
Nicholas.

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