[Talk-GB] [OSM-talk] Improving ref=* documentation

Mike Baggaley mike at tvage.co.uk
Thu Aug 5 08:07:46 UTC 2021


>If you have a road which is signed (for example) "A12" for almost its
entire length, but somewhere there is a one-off sign that says "A21", do we
tag that bit of >road as "A21"? Over what length? Or do we map following our
cognitive processes, and assume that the sign is erroneous?
>
>If you have a road that in fact used to be the B2009 but was declassified
years ago, but somewhere along its length there is a rusty fingerpost in the
hedge that >has the old number on it, does that road magically regain its
number from 30 years ago?
>
>If we are not going to let many decades of data modelling experience get in
the way of our tagging schema, we accept that there is only one "ref" for a
road. How >we judge which one to choose is what we are discussing here. Most
arguments seem to revolve around a use case whereby a car driver is
navigating, looking at >signs to help decide which way to go. The human
brain is good at glossing over mistakes that appear obvious, but that's no
reason to propagate them.

I suggest using name:signed and ref:signed to hold incorrectly signed
values. You can then have name:signed=yes, name:signed=no and
name:signed=<signed name>. I would suggest that if used to hold a value
other than yes/no, then source:name and/or source:ref ought to also be
specified so that it is clear why the name/ref is not the same as the sign.

Cheers,
Mike




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