[Talk-GB] prow_ref format for Dorset Public Rights of Way

[Robert Whittaker (OSM lists)]

On Thu, 16 Apr 2020 at 15:34, Nick Whitelegg
<nick.whitelegg at solent.ac.uk> wrote:
> I wasn't familiar with the situation in Dorset but MapThePaths uses the 'SE 4/22' scheme (actually it appears as 'SE 4 22') so if people want to use MTP as a source for prow_refs, then that would be the format to use.

In general, I think that tools (mine included) should follow agree
tagging, rather than the tagging following the tools.

> In terms of how I arrive at the references, I sourced the data from the rowmaps site and applied a script which looked for a particular field (I forget its name) in the rowmaps data. This is done consistently across all counties.

Unfortunately, my experience of the rowmaps data itself is that it's
not really consistent in what it puts in its fields. (That's not
rowmap's fault though -- Barry is just using whatever formats arrive
in the data his tool consumes.

> I don't really mind too much what people use to be honest, obviously something like 'Studland FP 1' or similar would be more descriptive, but would require an extra step to look up the parish name.
>
> Maybe we should develop some sort of (crowd-sourced?) service which looks up parishes based on parish codes to allow easy contribution of descriptive prow_refs?

I've started an effort in that direction at
https://osm.mathmos.net/prow/ref-formats/ . For each county in the
list there's a regular expression for parsing the prow_ref tag, and a
printf format for outputting a prow_ref tag from structured data. This
is then what my PRoW tool uses internally. I'm in the process of
adding the parish name/id lookup tables that I've collected to this
page. There's a JSON feed with the data to make it easier for others
to use it too.

> On the other hand some counties do not use parish refs at all in hhe number, though they do mention them in the full ref (e.g. FERNHURST 1254). The Chichester district of West Sussex (not OGL, by the way - unfortunately from my POV as it's an area I'm interested in) appears to use a simple number for all PROW refs, ranging from about 1-3500. This is not consistent in a given parish, e.g. numbers between 1200-1299 appear to be spread between Fernhurst, Lynchmere and Milland parishes.

Warwickshire is a bit like this too. It seems they numbered their
Rights of Way within each former district/borough. When this happens,
in my tool I treat these areas as "parishes". See e.g.
https://osm.mathmos.net/prow/progress/warks/north-warks/atherstone-rural-district/

Best wishes,

Robert.

-- 
Robert Whittaker