[Tagging] traffic_signs: human readable values vs. ISO and law codes

[Greg Troxel]

yo paseopor <yopaseopor at gmail.com> writes:

> Well, let's start. As you know there are values in traffic sign key that
> are human readable and others that are the ISO code of the country plus the
> code inside the traffic law of every country (from South Africa to USA). It
> is not a big problem...except they are using the same key.

So it is a big problem!

> Probably human readable values are the future of OSM, because you don't
> know very specific knowledge about that. So a newbey mapper can use iD
> Editor and put a maxspeed traffic sign, or can use hazard from a proposal
> from the wiki.
> But in the other hand major use in traffic_sign key are the legal and
> specific values for each traffic sign (or a combination of that). You can
> use the traffic laws of each country or specific presets, plugins and
> styles to edit them without big difficulty, too.
> What can we do? What value has to prevail in OSM: the specific or the
> verbose? What can we do if we want to maintain both of them?
> What do you think about that? With which tags would you separate that
> values?

It seems really obvious that normalized osm words and CC:codepoint are
different things and belong in different keys.

Part of the point is that renderers (including routing engines) and
humans want to see a value that can be interpreted regardless of country
and without having to know that country's laws.

I consider putting codepoints into traffic_sign abuse, and while the
name doesn't matter, traffic_sign_codepoint= seems reasonable, to make
the point that it is the other kind.