[Talk-us] Highway Tagging Consensus to Improve OSM (and address some of 41 latitude's concerns)

Peter Budny peterb at gatech.edu
Tue Oct 19 21:58:46 BST 2010


Toby Murray <toby.murray at gmail.com> writes:

> For example, Kansas highway 18:
> type = route
> route = road
> network = US:KS
> ref = 18
> (optional?) symbol=* tag

Also an optional wikipedia link.

> There does seem to be some debate about county roads. I would probably
> throw my vote in with something like "network=US:KS:Riley"

+1

The county name needs to be in there, otherwise you can't tell two
county roads apart which use the same number.  (Analogously, you
wouldn't put US:STATE... how would you know which state?)

I don't see any advantage to abbreviating the county name... that just
seems like more effort for mappers, with no real payback.  (I certainly
don't know abbreviations for all 159 counties in Georgia.)

> I do have one question: Is it acceptable/proper to have a name=* tag
> on a relation? I have seen it on some and have actually used it a
> couple of times - for example "name=KS 18"
>
> The only advantage I see is that it makes things easier to read in
> editors and when browsing data since the name tag is used when
> displaying relations in lists or listing what relations a way is part
> of instead of just showing the numeric ID. But this is a case of
> tagging for tools so I could see reasonable objections to it.

Well, the question is, does the name apply to the whole route?  For
basic cases, you might have "name=Interstate 75" or "name="U.S. Route
41".  For KY-555 you might have "name=Kentucky Route 555" and
"loc_name=Triple 5 Highway".

However, there are many stretches of road that are designated "Col. John
Q Public Memorial Highway" or something like that.  It only applies to
part of the route (the whole route through a state, or maybe just a
bridge or an intersection).  In that case, it belongs on the ways, not
the route.

So, there seems to be utility for both.  The question is, what happens
when both a way and a relation have name= set, and they don't match?
-- 
Peter Budny  \
Georgia Tech  \
CS PhD student \



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