[Tagging] [Talk-us] New MapRoulette Challenge - Add Surface to Highways

[Walker Kosmidou-Bradley]

Thanks Andy, 

We do use country default values and other customizations. I didn’t really want to unpack the entire methodology. The point is the more attribution we have, the easier and faster it is to conduct replicable analysis around the world. It helps from a coding perspective, even if the attribution might not make that much sense for any single country.

It just seems strange that people would complain about others adding specificity of attributes. If the data is not wrong, and as it not impacting you who cares? If you don’t want to do those tasks in MapRoulette, don’t. We all contribute to and interact with OSM data in different ways. If someone wants to go mark every species of tree, awesome. If others mark the smoothness of roads, awesome. That’s how the community works. Something might not make sense to me, but I’m sure it makes sense to the person making the task.

Best,

Walker KB

> On Feb 3, 2023, at 11:27, Andy Townsend <ajt1047 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On 2/3/23 09:16, Walker Kosmidou-Bradley wrote:
> 
>> I use routing to measure accessibility to schools and health clinics here in west Africa. I have to make sure that my models also work in South Asia. Having the surface tag attributed makes processing infinitely easier because I don’t have to adjust my default values based on country.
> 
> (veering off from TomTom's MapRoulette challenge somewhat, but)
> 
> Unfortunately, you will have to adjust your default values based on country.  There are enough differences even between mapping approaches in nearby western European countries that a router will produce nonsensical results if it makes assumptions valid only in place A in place B as well.
> 
> Also, even if someone filled in all the values for an "obvious" tag (perhaps in response to a MapRoulette challenge such as this one), there's no guarantee that new motorways would have the same tag added in the future, or that the tag would remain as more detail is added.
> 
> That said - sometimes values that are "obvious" in one place aren't "obvious" in another, so it's definitely worth having the discussion about that if it's relevant (which as numerous people have said previously, it isn't for this challenge in the US.
> 
> Best Regards,
> 
> Andy
> 
> 
> 
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