[Tagging] Reviving the path discussion - the increasing importance of trails in OSM

[Volker Schmidt]

We have now been reviving the path discussion in 73 messages, and counting
...
I still feel we are not understanding each other (or is it only me who is
lost?)
To me a highway=path is a concept that is well defined in the wiki, and the
various types can be described with existing tags.
A hiking route (sometimes called a hiking trail) is a concept that is
clearly defined in the wiki.
Both are very widely, and successfully used.
Dictionaries do not agree on whether a path is a type of trail or a trail
is type of path or whether they are synonyms. And I think this is at the
base of the discussion.
I would like to remind us that the British-English language words that we
use in OSM tags are code words to make life easier, the meaning of the code
words is defined by the mapping practice and that mapping practice is
documented in the wiki. The common language meaning of these code words is
in principle independent of the OSM meaning of the codes, and in that sense
irrelevant.

I still do not understand why we cannot describe well a mountain hiking
path with the existing tagging.
And what would the additional value path=trail (whatever it means) add
other than making life even more complicated for hiking routing developers?

In the context of this discussion, I would like to point to a recent new
tag which may help hiking trail mappers: Triggered by the collaboration
between OSM and the Italian Alpine Club (CAI), we do have now an additional
tagging instrument to characterize the difficulty of an entire hiking trail
relation with the tag cai_scale
<https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/cai_scale>. While
sac_cale is applied to every single way of a hiking trail relation,
cai_scale is assigned to the relation.

Volker
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tagging/attachments/20200526/0f113d37/attachment.htm>