[OSM-talk] Numbers and i18n

[Wollschaf]

On Mon, 31 Jul 2006 11:50:44 +0100, Etienne wrote:


> I think in this context (Street Maps) we should really be considering
> administrative classifications.  OSM can accommodate physical
> characteristics but that, to me, seems secondary for the most common kind
> of uses of OSM data.

In my opinion it is important to have both. Route planning software can
make better decisions if the physical properties are known. Looking at
maps.google.com (teledata maps) in my area, there are so many roads
rendered as if you could actually drive on them. In reality, you can't -
one car coming from the other direction and both are terribly stuck. Using
my route planning software, I've been sent through vineyards several
times. Usually, bigger roads were nearby that obviously were classified
the same way, perhaps as minor. Currently, I can't do better in OSM.

What should I tag a secondary road with that's several times bigger and
faster to drive on than the primary road nearby, thus clearly being the
preferred way to travel?

I think we need two sets of tags: one for physical properties and one for
the administrative classification, based on a scheme for every country.
This way everything can be tagged. Not every country is as ordered as we
are used to. I have severe trouble to fit the current highway values to
the roads I created in Sardinia, Italy. A lot of interpretation is needed
to fit the tags to the roads, and by reading a map created out of the
guesswork misunderstandings will occur.

To make OSM better than commercial map suppliers, we need as much metadata
as we can get. Physical road properties will definitely improve the maps.

Examples for a separated way classification:

waytype=A (2 lanes+ 1 breakdown lane on a motorway, or very wide road)
waytype=F (1 lane, wide enough for a car)
wayclass=uk:primary
wayclass=uk:motorway
wayclass=de:autobahn
wayclass=de:bundesstrasse

Administrative classification could then also be used to set permissions
and speed limits, which is currently not possible because of the diversity
of rules in different countries.

Perhaps the tag values should be all in english, to improve readability. I
would not want to write software using all these tags without
understanding the language behind. The tag value names are not as
important as the correlation... numbers are sufficient, but hard to
remember.

Wollschaf

**wondering now about highway=us:highway, and why whether just to remove
the high in way to make more sense. We're just dealing with ways, aren't
we?