[Tagging] surface earth vs ground vs dirt

Dave Swarthout daveswarthout at gmail.com
Tue Apr 12 23:39:35 UTC 2016


As usual, the meaning of these terms varies widely depending on who you ask
and which country you're mapping. To me, unpaved covers all of the cases
where there is no pavement present. That is, it includes roads with a
surface of dirt, gravel, grass, etc. I consider "unpaved" to be the top
category for road surfaces that are un-paved. Pun intended. U.S. mappers
never use the terms "ground" or "earth" to describe a road surface,
consequently I never use them. The combination of of surface=unpaved and
tracktype=* can be useful to define drivability when real life checking on
the ground can be accomplished.

I agree that these tags should not be merged. And defining the surface
types more rigorously is going to be difficult because of that same
worldwide variability mentioned earlier, one person's dirt road is another
person's ground.

Good luck,
Dave

On Wed, Apr 13, 2016 at 2:19 AM, Jean-Marc Liotier <jm at liotier.org> wrote:

> On 04/12/2016 08:29 PM, Martin Koppenhoefer wrote:
>
>> ground is a synonym for [..] without man made coating
>>
>
> As I tag heavily with surface=ground, this is indeed my definition. I use
> that when I tag from orbital imagery, when I'm certain that there is no
> man-made coating but I can't distinguish whether the surface is sand or raw
> dirt... My on-the-ground (pun intended) experience of the areas where I use
> this tag (mostly Senegal) tells me that it is usually either or a mix of
> the two that varies along the way. When I have visual evidence that the
> highway is at least packed dirt, then I use 'unpaved'.
>
>
>
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-- 
Dave Swarthout
Homer, Alaska
Chiang Mai, Thailand
Travel Blog at http://dswarthout.blogspot.com
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