[Tagging] Deprecated features - highway=disused

[Colin Smale]

As the concept of "disused" could apply to millions of different things, 
I would prefer to see a more generic system which could be applied 
uniformly. I would like to see the "life_cycle" tag resurrected 
(proposed in 2008) something like this:
     life_cycle=planned (only exists on paper)
     life_cycle=construction (under construction)
     life_cycle=open (default, open for business)
     life_cycle=disused (but could easily be re-opened)
     life_cycle=abandoned (could not easily be re-opened)
     life_cycle=temp_closed (e.g. during road works)
     life_cycle=temporary (only in existance for a short time, e.g. 
during road works)

A generic method of tagging a generic concept feels much better than the 
variety of ways described in 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Comparison_of_life_cycle_concepts .

This was proposed in 2008 (see 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_Features/Status) but was 
rejected after a tied vote 15-15. Most of the objections centred around 
backward compatibility problems. If it's the right thing to do, sure 
it's going to cause a little pain in the short term, but the problems 
will only get bigger if the nettle is not grasped.

Colin

On 21/12/2010 00:15, Craig Wallace wrote:
> On 20/12/2010 22:23, dies38061 at mypacks.net wrote:
>> I came across 
>> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Disused_road 
>> today.  I applied the proposal page template, indicating that the 
>> proposal had been obsoleted, as noted in the commentary on the page.  
>> Looking at the tag info for highway 
>> (http://taginfo.openstreetmap.de/keys/highway), I see that there are 
>> presently 88 instances of highway=disused.
>>
>> Would you support addition of highway=discussed to 
>> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Deprecated_features as:
>> * Date: (date of agreement here)
>> * Old Key/Value: highway=disused
>> * Suggested Replacement: highway=*&  disused=yes&  access=yes (no 
>> implied)
>> * Reason: creation of general disused key
>>
>> The main problem I see with this proposal is the indication at 
>> key:disused that the use of the key implies access=no, which is not 
>> necessarily true in the case of a highway which is disused.  Could 
>> this be circumvented by the inclusion of the 'access=yes' 
>> recommendation in the suggested replacement?
>>
>> Thanks for considering this. --ceyockey 
>> (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:Ceyockey)
>
> I think using disused=yes is a very bad idea.
> It will break all of the existing renderers/applications that don't 
> know about that key, as they will show disused roads as normal roads, 
> or use them for routing etc.
> It means any routing application has to check for two different tags 
> (or even more if you get things like abandoned=yes, construction=yes 
> etc), before knowing whether the road is usable or not.
>
> So I think disused=yes should be deprecated.
> I think a better option would be a kind of namespace thing. eg 
> something like highway:disused=primary etc.
> Then that will be safely ignored by any applications that don't 
> know/care about these roads.
>
> There's a useful page here which summarizes some of this, and the 
> pros/cons of different options: 
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Comparison_of_life_cycle_concepts
>
> Craig
>
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