[Potlatch-dev] Suggestion for "lifecycle" tag - comments?

[Andy Allan]

On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 10:31 PM, Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>  Thought I'd solicit comments before implementing the following:
> <feature>
>    <tag k="highway" v="tertiary" lifecycle="road"/>
>    <inputSet ref="road_lifecycle"/>
> ...
> </feature>
>
> <inputSet id="road_lifecycle">
>  <input type="choice" presence="onTagMatch" name="Life-cycle" lifecycle="yes">
>    <choice value="" text="Complete" description="Road is open for business."/>
>    <choice value="proposed" text="Proposed" description="Road has
> official approval, but construction has not started."/>
>    <choice value="construction" text="Under construction"
> description="Road is under construction."/>
> ...
>  </input>
> </inputSet>
>
>
> <lifecycle id="road">
>  <stage>proposed</stage>
>  <stage>construction</stage>
>  <stage>abandoned</stage>
> ...
> </lifecycle>
>
> This would have the effect that "highway=proposed, proposed=tertiary"
> would get matched (thanks to the <lifecycle> definition). Selecting
> from a dropdown with "lifecycle" attribute set would cause the same
> split tag structure to be created (or removed). (That same attribute
> would cause the "key" attribute on the lifecycle element to get set to
> the tag on the feature that has the lifecycle attribute - a bit ugly)
>
> Anyway think the element names could be refined slightly. Are there
> any other tags that work this way, apart from the lifecycle ones? Do
> different tags have different lifecycles (I seem to recall that
> railways have more states). Should I just hard-code it all?

My first thought is to just have another couple of highway types ( a
proposed highway and a highway under construction ) with a list of
classifications in a choice input, and maybe some date inputs for when
they are opening and so on. That could all be done quite easily with
the current map_features code, and more importantly, there would be no
unnecessary UI for managing the lifecycle of the 99.999% of roads in
OSM that are neither proposed nor under construction.

Cheers,
Andy