[Talk-de] Specialised Mapping Tools For Germany

[Stefan Schwan]

Hi!

2009/8/4 Nick Black <nickblack1 at gmail.com>:
> Hi Guys,
> I haven't heard anything back from you, so I'm going to annoy you some more.
>  I'm really keen to hear any thoughts you have on how OSM editors could
> better support the German mapping community.  After all the calls to ban
> Potlatch, there must be some constructive criticism out there ;-)
> Any ideas are appreciated.

First of all: I do not think that the discontent with Potlatch comes
from being an English language editor, but from other aspects of it's
design. The long time missing "edit with save" and other features
solved a lot of that and critics have become very silent lately.

My 2 cents on the difficulties of tagging in Germany and the ideal editor:

Translation is an issue within the community: Especially the
wiki-pages are often translated incorrectly and discussions about the
right interpretation are difficult. However, the problem does often
not arise from translation itself, but from difficulties of applying
the English road classification system on German conditions.

We have for example, neither a "trunk-road", nor a "unclassified" road
in our legal classification. The adoption of these terms can only be
taken vaguely and leaves much room for individual interpretation.

Tagging a trunk road is easy in England - if the sign says it's a
trunk-road, you'll tag it a trunk road. In Germany however, in most of
the cases it's very likely that a combination of tags has to be
applied

There are of course roads similar to a trunk-road:
We have "motorway-like" roads, which are basically the same as
motorways but do no have to, but can have, a special legal
classification. Regardless, if they are not a legal Autobahn, those
roads are tagged as trunk.
On the other hand, we have the legal class of "Kraftfahrstrasse",
which are often, but do not have to be, "motorway-like" and are tagged
explicitly as "motorroad=true".

With unclassified it's even more difficult:  For a Germans, it is very
hard to understand, that a road that is called "unclassified" is
actually just classified as "unclassified".
German country roads are being classified by their maintainer, which
is either Kreis (regional), Landes (state) or Bundes (federal). The
Problem is, that the status of the responsible maintainer does not say
anything about the status of the actual road. A Kreisstrasse can be
bigger, in better shape and more important to traffic than a
Bundesstraße nearby, it might even be autobahn-like.

There is no actual consensus, which factor is more important for
tagging: Size, classification or importance to whatever regional
traffic? Tagging wars arouse about this question, in both the database
and the wiki, and so do lengthly discussions.

Municipally maintained roads make things worse: They are (of course)
somehow officially classified - but they are not marked as such and
the classification is basically unknown. "highway=unclassified"  is
widely tagged in distinction to a residential road as "a road having
no distinct legal classification (Kreis-/Landes-/Bundesstrasse) and
are no residential road", while other mappers interpret unclassified
as a road somehow larger or more important than a residential road and
see it as part of a hierarchy ranging from track (lowest) to motorway
(highest).

An ideal editor for Germany can not to be based on a translated
key=value scheme, but will always always have to take the necessity of
combining tags into account.

I think, it would help if entering tags would move away from the text
/checkbox form to a more graphical and questionnairish  style:

A click on a motorway picture could than start a dialog like: "Is it a
legal Autobahn, or Autobahn-like? Autobahn-like would lead to "Is it a
Kraftfahrstrasse?" if not: "is cycling allowed? on a track or lane?"
continuing with "ref, maxspeed ect."

A click on a inner city road would bring up the question "Is it a road
where people live?" "Is it a Kreis/Landes/Bundesstr.?"

The whole process should be an a mixture of questions and interactive
graphics: "Does the road have a cycleway?" should produce a graphical
feedback with further options.

The Questions would not have to be represented by an actual tag in the
database: Based on sample photos graphics and questions like "Is the
road a connection road for interregional traffic?" the editor should
be supposed to know all tags and combinations and could, for example,
upgrade a unclassified road out of a residential area to a tertiary
road.

The aim should be to keep Otto Mapper away from the technical stuff:
It must not be necessary for a newbie to crawl through tons of
wikipages with contradictory information and inconsensus to find find
out the right tagging. He should have an intuitive interface to enter
what he sees in front of his house - not worrying about tags and
combinations, that long ago were invented for a country far away from
him ;)

bye,
Stefan