[Talk-GB] UK Rights of Way - WikiProject

[Stephen Colebourne]

As a relatively new mapper, two things stand out to me.

1) What Potlatch offers will be used. That means
h=footway/cycleway/bridleway/track will be used over h=path

2) The footway/cycleway/bridleway classification scheme makes perfect
sense to me. Any path I see I in town I can easily classify into one
of the three - most are footways, some are dedicated cycleways, and on
somewhere like Wimbledon Common there is a dedicated bridleway. Thus
h=path is something I would perceive as a fallback.

Note that at no point am I caring about designated rights of way. That
is a much more complex thing to determine it would seem, and not
something that a casual or new mapper would be bothered by.

Tag the broad view of what you see. The PROW or other stuff is
*detail*. Let normal mappers add the basic
footway/cycleway/bridleway/track, and expert mappers add the detail
later.

Stephen


On 7 May 2012 13:10, Chris Hill <osm at raggedred.net> wrote:
> On 07/05/12 10:34, Jonathan Harley wrote:
>>
>> On 06/05/12 17:22, Andrew M. Bishop wrote:
>>>
>>> Andy Street<mail at andystreet.me.uk>  writes:
>>>
>>>> On Fri, 2012-05-04 at 14:32 +0100, Andrew Chadwick wrote:
>>>> I'd agree that generic consumers will struggle with highway=path,
>>>> designation=* but that is a wider OSM issue and not limited to the
>>>> path/footway, etc. debate. Anyone using OSM data should be
>>>> pre-processing it to take into account local laws/customs and their
>>>> particular use case. For example, you are probably going to come a
>>>> cropper if you go around assuming that roads across the globe without an
>>>> explicit maxspeed tag all have the same default value.
>>>
>>> As the author of a consumer of OSM data I for one would prefer it if
>>> there was a single set of tags worldwide.  In my case the consumer of
>>> the data is Routino a router for OSM data (http://www.routino.org/).
>>
>>
>> That makes sense - but the question is, should tagging be optimised for
>> mappers/map editors, or for map consumers, if those things conflict?
>>
>>> My personal opinion is that the biggest risk to OSM's future is if we
>>> don't agree on a subset of tagging rules to be used worldwide.  The
>>> idea that there could be a pre-processor to handle local laws and
>>> customs is impractical.  There are literally hundreds of regions that
>>> might use their own tagging rules each of which needs to be defined by
>>> a geographical region and list of rules.  Each consumer of data then
>>> needs to implement the full set of pre-processor rules.
>>
>>
>> No; only consumers of data who want worldwide coverage (and who care about
>> the tags that vary around the world) would have to do that. And I think that
>> would still be easier than getting mappers worldwide to conform to a rigid
>> tagging system.
>>
>> I'm not sure what I think is the biggest risk to OSM's future but I think
>> attempting to impose an unwieldy system of tags on contributors is right up
>> there. I think a large part of OSM's success so far is due to its simplicity
>> and informality.
>>
>>> With a single set of rules a way can be taken from an OSM XML file and
>>> it will be immediately apparent who is permitted to use it.  With a
>>> pre-processor it is necessary to take the way from the file, search
>>> through the whole file to find the nodes that are referenced by it,
>>> search through all defined regions to determine which one the nodes
>>> belong to and then apply the selected pre-processor.
>>>
>>> One thing that we shouldn't lose sight of is that each item in OSM is
>>> created once and edited a few times by a small number of editors but
>>> used many hundreds of time each day by many dozens of data consumers.
>>> Since the number of times the data is read far exceeds the number of
>>> times the data is written (by orders of magnitude) the complexity
>>> should be in the writing side and not the reading side.
>>
>>
>> I disagree. Consumers of OSM data should embrace Postel's Law. Besides,
>> rule-based processing is just CPU cycles. Those are far less valuable than
>> OSM contributor brain power.
>>
>> Also, there's no reason data consumers have to use "raw" OSM data. Someone
>> could post-process OSM to produce dumps that have "normalised" rights of way
>> information, and publish those files for the benefit of that subset of
>> consumers who happen to care about rights of way being consistent around the
>> world. I think that's a much better way to go than laying down rigid rules
>> for mappers, or running bots that try to bash OSM into the shape needed by a
>> particular consumer.
>>
> + 1
>
> Mappers are far too precious to lose by making tagging schemes that suit
> data consumers and not mappers. OSM has grown partly because free tagging
> has allowed the base of tags to grow as people who are interested in a
> subject add tags that suit that object. The consensus over tagging is pretty
> good, just by good sense and a common purpose.
>
> I am certainly in favour of using tags that everyone agrees with, but
> certainly not a restricted list whether that is driven by data consumers,
> some committee or wiki editors. Even worse are bots or mass edits that
> flatten diversity from the database in the name of conformity. I view
> changing someone's carefully chosen tag (not just typos) to something else
> as vandalism.
>
> --
> Cheers, Chris
> user: chillly
>
>
>
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