[Talk-us] US highway classification

Paul Johnson baloo at ursamundi.org
Sun May 29 22:16:01 BST 2011


On 05/29/2011 02:00 PM, Anthony wrote:
> On Sun, May 29, 2011 at 4:03 PM, Paul Johnson <baloo-PVOPTusIyP/srOwW+9ziJQ at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>> On 05/29/2011 12:56 PM, Anthony wrote:
>>> What do you mean by "global consistency" and why is it desired?
>>
>> Having some kind of uniformity on a large scale means you wouldn't have
>> to learn how to read the map again just because you moved or traveled to
>> an arbitrary jurisdiction.
> 
> Great, so to answer your question, we've already achieved global consistency.

For motorways and POIs, sure, but for everything else, it's a real
crapshoot.  It doesn't help that we have some agitating forces
mass-replacing tags on the basis of The World According To Him, but that
appears to be a situation of subtle mass vandalism that OSM is happy to
ignore and highly resistant to actually confronting¹.

>> Also provides consistency for routers, since
>> I can pretty much guarantee there's not a router out there that
>> arbitrarily changes it's behavior based on what part of OpenStreetMap
>> it's looking at...
> 
> Then you can pretty much guarantee that there's not a router out there
> that works very well on OSM data across multiple locations.

Yeah, that's something of an issue.  We shouldn't make it harder for
data consumers to consume the data just because the human factor is
resistant to consistency.

¹ so whatever on that...it's a dead horse at this point, as much as I'd
like mass vandalism to be dealt with, it appears we're unwilling or
unable to actually handle such a situation.

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