[Talk-us] Caliparks re-tagging paths?

[Greg Troxel]

Alan McConchie <alan.mcconchie at gmail.com> writes:

> Thanks everyone for your strong but sincere criticism so far. In the
> thread here on talk-us, I explained _what_ we were trying to do, but I
> didn't explain very much about our rationale: _why_ we think this is
> an important idea. The wiki proposal explains that a little bit
> better, as does my email to the tagging list.

I think it would help if you set out your goals, rather than your
mechanism.  I think people are generally sympathetic to recording true
information about the world (that an authority disapproves of a
particular trail).  But, I think many see an element of censorship here,
in terms of trying to hide information from standard consumers of data.

It seems the consensus on talk-us was to use access=no (if usage is
indeed prohibited in some formal sense).  And there are discussions
about some other additional tags to denote positive or negative official
status.

> I know that there are a wide range of opinions within OSM, but I want
> to make it clear that we don't think we were "breaking" OSM data for
> anybody. We were applying the knowledge of local, on-the-ground

I see it as very much breaking data, intentionally.  Several have talked
about how the intent was to cause trails that actually exist to
disappear from maps made by others from the database.  That's the basic
problem and why so many are unhappy about this.

> experts in order to better describe the world within the free-form
> tagging system that exists within OSM. Remember that there are no hard

While the tagging system is free form, there's a very well established
notion of adding access, surface condition, and other nuances by
additional keys that if not understood do not break the main concept.

So the disagreement is really about whether highway=path includes as a
main concept a trail that really exists that you can really walk on, but
with the detail that the authority doesn't like it.

Another problem with wanting to pivot the main tag to the thing you care
about is that there are many people with many concerns.  Why shouldn't
there be highway=unpaved_path so that those don't show up on other
people's maps?  Or a dozen other variations?

> and fast rules within OSM, only informal standards and common
> practices. Please also note that the official proposal process does
> not require anyone to have a new tag approved before they start using
> it. Also see: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Any_tags_you_like
> <https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Any_tags_you_like>

That's true for using new tags for new objects.

It's not true for suppressing data that others have entered.  That's the
concerning part of this whole situation -- party A has the intent is to
control how party B renders data entered by party C, without B or C's
consent.

I think the $64K question is: Do you see it as central to your goals to
cause maps rendered by others to omit these trails, even if those others
don't want to omit them?  Or are you content to have advisory metadata
that people are encourage to use (in routing, and in rendering, like how
access=no works now)?

-gdt, unaffiliated mapper

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