[Talk-us] Moving historic railroad ways from OSM to OpenHistoricalMap

Brad Neuhauser brad.neuhauser at gmail.com
Fri Apr 3 04:05:11 UTC 2015


>
>
> I'm fully with Russ and Greg on this one. For the few vocal deletionists
> who
> seem to have ants in their pants about this, may I suggest that you just
> learn to read 'railway=abandoned' as 'manmade=former_railway_grade', which
> is entirely verifiable and consistent with OSM's approach of meaningful
> broad-brush duck tagging. Thanks.
>
> I don't get what's with this "deletionist" talk. It's hyperbolic
name-calling which I don't think is a helpful way to resolve issues. We ALL
delete stuff from OSM. "Let ye that have never deleted a node cast the
first stone!"

That is, if a building exists, we tag it. If it is disused, we tag it as
such. If it falls into ruin, we can tag that. If it is removed (demolished,
burned down, etc), usually, it is deleted. There is provision for
some tagging like demolished:building=* on the life cycle page, but it's
not used in the majority of cases. (sidebar: for an example where this is
used, and a new building has been built and added to OSM at the same
location, see http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/183167659)

So, is the argument here that we should no longer delete features that no
longer exist, just retag them? Is the argument that we generally should
delete such features, but railways are a special case where we shouldn't?

Which leads to one more thing, I think there's an important distinction to
be made in this conversation between the tags railway=abandoned and
railway=razed. According to the railway wikipage, railway=abandoned means "the
track has been removed and the line may have been reused or left to decay
but is still clearly visible" and railway=razed means "all evidence of the
line has been removed". Many of the reasons given in this thread for
keeping ex-railway features seem to apply to abandoned, not razed. At this
point I don't remember how this thread started (abandoned or razed), but if
you look back at previous discussions (for ex
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Demolished_Railway or the linked thread),
it seems like most people have been OK in the end with keeping abandoned in
OSM but not keen on the demolished/razed features.

Brad


>
>
> --
> View this message in context:
> http://gis.19327.n5.nabble.com/Moving-historic-railroad-ways-from-OSM-to-OpenHistoricalMap-tp5839116p5839518.html
> Sent from the USA mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Talk-us mailing list
> Talk-us at openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-us/attachments/20150402/6c0f93be/attachment-0001.html>


More information about the Talk-us mailing list