[Talk-GB] Wiki - United_Kingdom_Tagging_Guidelines

[Andy Street]

On Tue, 2011-03-01 at 19:26 +0000, Andy Allan wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 1, 2011 at 5:55 PM, Andrew <andrewhainosm at hotmail.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> > The great strength of OSM is that it can be a platform for many (and hopefully
> > more to come) applications written by people all round the world.
> > Country-specific tagging guidelines make it more difficult to share applications
> > with the rest of the world.
> 
> I'd say that country-specific guidelines are worthwhile, so long as
> they are helping mappers converge on global standards. For example, I
> think you'd support country-specific guidelines similar to "In France,
> tag Autoroutes as highway=motorway. In Germany, tag Autobahns as
> highway=motorway. In the UK, tag Motorways as highway=motorway" and so
> on.
> 
> You're mistaking "country-specific guidelines" with "country-specific tagging".

I'd agree with this. What I think would be useful is a "local_norms"
file to accompany planet.osm listing default values for certain
geographical regions that could be automatically processed by software.
One example is highway=mini_roundabout which the wiki states is
anti-clockwise by default. I've not checked but I'd wager that we're
missing direction=clockwise on a fair few in the UK. Surely it be easier
to state "all mini-roundabouts in the UK are clockwise unless specified
otherwise".

Andy