[Tagging] cycle highways in Belgium (WAS: Feature Proposal - RFC - value 'basic_network' - cycle_network?)

[stevea]

(Using email in this "single" thread in the talk-list is getting more and more difficult!)

Volker and Seppe:  I'm actually glad to see Belgium using cycle_network with a value like BE-VLG:cycle_highway.  This displays that (somebody in OSM who cares about careful bicycle tagging in) Belgium took the time to "develop" this value and gain consensus in using it, perhaps in a wider scheme country-wide.  It would be good if this / these were documented in our cycle_network wiki, but I believe we agree that isn't absolutely required.  Thank you for documenting it in its OWN wiki, Seppe (or whoever wrote that).

Volker and Pete:  I know Volker said that "the ref F7 is repeated in the name" and Peter said "the cycle_network=* tag is not adding much here," but let's not forget that sometimes something which has a rich tagging in OSM might be "looked at" (consumed by an end-user, parsed by a query from something like Overpass Turbo, rendered on a bicycle route renderer...) in different ways.  The "double tagging" that seems apparent to you adds some flexibility to these at the small cost of what might seem like redundant tagging data in our database, but that (redundant) tagging adds the ability for one set of use cases to parse one way and another to parse with another.  This isn't ideal, as there truly is some redundancy in our data (in the future, this can be avoided with good design, though it is hard to predict the future and foresee all future use cases), but it does allow for multiple use cases in our data, and we should both expect that and even accommodate it.  Good design is great, but it doesn't always happen, so let's be flexible enough to allow it when we get examples like this.

Sebastian:  In retrospect I do agree with you that the word "basic" (like the word "type") is best avoided because of the ease with which it is confused and can often be ambiguous across a wide swath of people, creating a lot of misunderstanding.  (This may be the entire root cause of this thread!)  So I redact my suggestion that a "sub-value" in cycle_network might contain the word basic.  I do still consider extending the values of network (from icn, ncn, rcn, lcn) to also add bcn, although that "b" is standing for basic.  That seems to me like a "better" place in the syntax to denote this form of network, but I'm still "trying it on for size."  Again, I'm doing a lot of listening with this relatively complex topic.  There are a lot of cooks in the kitchen here!

SteveA