[Tagging] Time is now: tag ALL traffic signs in OSM

[Colin Smale]

On 2017-05-21 14:35, Martin Koppenhoefer wrote:

> 2017-05-21 14:05 GMT+02:00 Colin Smale <colin.smale at xs4all.nl>:
> 
>> WHY do we put traffic signs into OSM?
> 
> I do it because in the past in many occassions I have found the maxspeed I had mapped, later destroyed by mappers who had merged the ways with different maxspeeds back into one way, and I was hoping that the explicit sign positions would:
> 
> a) reduce this problematic behaviour (because they would maybe better see why the ways were split) 
> 
> b) facilitate fixing the problems later (because usually the signs were not deleted) 
> 
> c) facilitate working in iterations (not surveying everything at once and alone, but building on previous surveys by me and others to construct together the correct maxspeed for all roads)
> 
> d) allow to check until when a restriction applies (often maxspeeds are added to ways but the mapper doesn't verify it applies to the whole osm way, or beyond that actual osm-way)

Basically only d) is related to functionality for the consumer of the
data - a/b/c are about the OSM-internal process of how we get there. If
we don't have some view of what we want to get out of OSM, then any
discussion about normalising what to put in is pointless. We have all
heard of ROM - in my time I have seen too many systems effectively
become WOM because too many stakeholders say "I want to store XYZ"
instead of something like "I want to be able to get XYZ out, in the form
of ... related to ..." 

So maybe I should rephrase my rather unnuanced question a bit: What do
OSM data-consumers hope to be able to do with traffic signs? That, after
all, is basically WHY we are storing them, isn't it? 

And for anyone who thinks this is a silly question, I would challenge
you to explain WHY you want to ignore the users of OSM data. 

//colin
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