[Tagging] airstrip vs runway

[Christoph Hormann]

On Monday 09 October 2017, Bill Ricker wrote:
> > I see no reason why these cannot be retagged as 'runway'.
>
> NO NO NO
>
> 'airstrip' and 'runway' are terms of art in Aviation.
> The distinction is important.

Since this still seems to be a widespread misconception:  The meaning of 
the words used for key and value in English language does not 
necessarily have any connection to the meaning of the tag in OSM.

Famous cases:

A National Forest is not necessarily landuse=forest.
A National Park is likely never leisure=park.

In this case practical use of aeroway=runway includes any airstrips with 
on-the-ground verifiablility - i.e. where you can observe this use of 
the area on the ground and not just conclude this from the fact that 
aircrafts have landed there in the past.

This does not mean you cannot use a different tag for a subset of what 
is is currently covered by aeroway=runway but doing so will usually 
just result in fairly arbitrary application by mappers so using a 
subtag (like runway=airstrip) is likely a better approach.

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/