[Tagging] Should 'highway=incline[_steep]' be discouraged?

Roy Wallace waldo000000 at gmail.com
Tue Dec 29 04:49:55 GMT 2009


On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 2:09 PM, Matthias Julius <lists at julius-net.net> wrote:
>
>> But that's my point - sure, you don't want to lose "semantics" i.e.
>> "meaning". But IMHO "steep" is *meaningless*.
>
> Why?

Because it's not well defined. If you want to define "steep" as
meaning "greater than or equal to 15% incline", THEN it has meaning.
But until then, it's meaningless.

> It is at least as meaningful as 'smoothness=good|bad|horrible'.

The wiki page for Key:smoothness says "it is clear...that a major part
of the community does not like this key". But at least there is some
attempt at a definition of "good|bad|horrible" given here:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Approved_features/Smoothness. But
IMHO they're still not well defined.

>>> Validators could warn about ambiguous incline tags, though.
>>
>> Yup I think this is the best solution. Unless, of course, nobody
>> *wants* to tag incline=* on nodes :) But assuming they do, they should
>> be able to.
>
> Of course, everyone can tag what he wants anyway.  The question is what
> we want to encourage.

What I mean to say is, unless you can think of a better way to tag
incline=* on nodes, we should encourage the use of incline=* for this
purpose (as opposed to some other tag like inclination=* or
steepness=*, or node_incline=* etc., which would just be silly).




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