[talk-au] Hiking tracks: foot=yes or foot=designated?

[Steve Bennett]

On Sun, Feb 28, 2010 at 10:40 AM, John Henderson <snowgum at gmx.com> wrote:
> Perhaps we can just agree that we differ?

> I support international uniformity in standards unless there's a very
> good reason to do otherwise.  I suppose that's partly due to my spending
> the last 15 years of my working life as an analyst/programmer with the
> international search & rescue community.  In so many ways (both critical
> and trivial), I've seen the positive benefits of falling into line, and
> the negative consequences of failing to do so.

Ok, so give me some examples of what could happen if NWN in Australia
doesn't mean the same as NWN in Germany or Sweden or Japan?

Also, while I'm in favour of standards - is there even a standard
here? Google "standard rwn nwn lwn iwn", and there is a single
relevant hit:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Walking_Routes

Second paragraph:
----
Is it worth adopting the same idea as for cycling, i.e. three levels
of hierarchy - national, regional, and local.
----

I don't see a standard here. It's *possible* there is a European
standard. Even if that were the case, Australia is not in Europe, so
the merits of following that standard are debatable, given our vastly
different scale, geography, population etc.

The only place I can even see a non-tautological definition for these
networks is here:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Relation:route
----
foot	 iwn	 International walking network: long distance paths used for
walking routes that cross several countries, for example the Camino de
Santiago
foot	 nwn	 National walking network: long distance paths used for
walking routes that cross countries
foot	 rwn	 Regional walking network: used for walking routes that
cross regions. In Belgium and the Netherlands this is used for the
walking node networks
foot	 lwn	 Local walking network: used for small local walking routes.
Could be touristic loops or routes crossing a city
----

Clearly this scheme was devised only with Europe in mind. A "long
distance path" that "crosses a country" in Australia would be as long
as an IWN in Europe.  A regional trail in Australia would be as long
as a NWN in Europe. And so forth.

> You're not going to convince me that Australia should go it's own way
> without mounting a stronger case.  That's not to say that in general I
> won't follow the standards adopted within Australia.

http://osm.lonvia.de/world_hiking.html?zoom=7&lat=-35.53863&lon=145.79295&layers=FFBT

It would be nice to see the Hume and Hovell Trail, and (when mapped)
the Great Dividing Trail (Bendigo to Ballarat with offshoots), and
perhaps others. You're effectively arguing that this map should never
show those trails at this scale. Therefore, if Australians want to see
maps like that at this scale, they're going to need an
Australian-specific map that interprets NWN/RWN/LWN differently. How
does this support interoperability?

NWN (Switzerland): A trail of approximately 200-500km
NWN (Australia): A trail of approximately 500-10000km.
...
Rather different things, imho.

Steve