[Openstreetmap] Re: [Openstreetmap-dev] OSM's Schema - moving it forwards.

[Nick Whitelegg]

>Having spoken to Steve last week I shared with him a set of tags and keys
I
>had developed a few years back for a street gazetteer I planned to
>implement. That didn't happen but joining this project a few months back
>caused me to revisit it, especially considering that one of the stumbling
>blocks to getting more involved is a lack of a full tag/key/value type
>implementation.

I have already tagged a number of nodes and segments that I have uploaded
to OSM
with keys and values. Admittedly they are more countryside/pedestrian
rather
than urban/car orientated, but hopefully fairly general use:

The system I have used is as follows.

Segments
========
I have used keys of
"name", "foot", "horse", "bike", "car" and "class". These are as follows:

"name" - the segment name e.g. a street name. Standard OSM key.

"foot" - is the segment accessible to pedestrians?
Values: no, unofficial or yes.
"unofficial" means that the segment is accessible to pedestrians, but this
is
at the discretion of the landowner - it's not a legal right of way.

"horse" and "bike" follow the same pattern as foot; "car" is only no or
yes.
"class" describes the class of segment i.e. how big a road is it?

The values I have used include:
path - a path, typically too narrow for motorised traffic to follow.
unsurfaced - unsurfaced track.
minor - minor road e.g. country lane
estate - estate road, i.e. the sort of road you would find in a housing
estate,
of little interest to through traffic;
street - street in the centre of town, but not classified B or A;
secondary - the equivalent of a B road in the UK;
primary - the equivalent of an A road in the UK;
motorway - the equivalent of a motorway in the UK.

Nodes
=====

Nodes can have a "name", also a "class". The
"class" describes the type of node.
Values I have used include "pub", "hill", "car park",
"restaurant", "viewpoint", "amenity", "farm" etc.

My own site which uses OSM, Freemap-OSM (www.free-map.org.uk/osm), uses
these keys and values
to render different segments and nodes in different ways. osm-editor can
also handle these
keys and values.

I think there is a case for standardising at least some of these keys and
values, after
agreeing on a common scheme. In particular, name and class, and also,
arguably,
accessibility to foot, horse, bike and car are fairly fundamental
properties.

So we could have, in a future version:

<node name="Red Lion" class="pub"/>

or

<segment from="249999" to="250000" name="Smith Road" class="secondary"
car="yes" foot="yes"/>

Nick