[Tagging] cyclist profiles - was:Feature Proposal - RFC - value 'basic_network' - cycle_network?

[stevea]

Wow, THANK YOU, Sebastian!  What a comprehensive post.

I had a feeling (confirmed by your links) that there was some "official-ese" language / publications about these.  While they are in German and I have virtually no facility with it, I will struggle ahead with machine translation and do my very best to understand intention and possible denotational assistance in OSM from these documents.

Decades ago, I heard a "joke" about the agglutinative morphology of (Swiss?) German (nouns, especially) that make 31-letter-long words which literally translated mean something like "that place in the center of the town square where the streetcars usually stop."  (I might be badly marring that, but it was something similar).  In English, an actually related language, or as an OSM key-value, we might say "tram_stop."  I certainly have noticed that in Dutch and the Netherlands implementation(s) of innovative bicycle (routing, network(s)), there are similar agglutinations of "Fietsroutenetwerks" and I now discover from your links that these really are "things" in Germany, as well.  Again, thank you for presenting these publications to the list.  I am hopeful they can further clarify.

I hear you loud and clear on the many difficulties associated with representing / denoting / mapping these in OSM.  I do not wish to hinder those efforts, I wish for them to be widely understood among mappers in the rest of the world so we can coherently fashion together the nuts and bolts of good relational database ingredients (primitives of nodes, ways, relations and tags) that denote these with agreeable methods.

And it isn't always pretty or especially easy as we do so.  The efforts are seriously appreciated.

< remainder redacted for brevity, though it seems far too late to be talking about "brevity" here! :-) >