[OSM-talk] keys

[Lars Aronsson]

Dean Earley wrote:

> I normally refer to them as Motorways, A roads, B roads, Back 
> roads, Tracks, and I VERY rarely use the word "highway" (I 
> thought it was an American thing).
> 
> We do however need some standard system across all languages 
> (1,2,3,4,5,6?)

I took a look at the GEOnet Names Server (GNS) and compared the 
Scandinavian countries plus Germany and Poland.  Compiled by a 
U.S. military agency, the GNS is a freely downloadable list of 
georeferenced locations (points only, no areas or lines), 
typically town centers.  The more you analyze these data, the more 
they look like random white noise.

Each record has 25 fields. Fields 10 and 11 are the Feature 
Classification (FC) and Feature Designation Code (DSG).  For 
example S-AIRF is a airfield, S-CSTL is a castle and V-FRST is a 
forest, where S stands for spot features and V for vegetation.  
There are few roads (R-) in there, but too few to help us.

As could be expected, the volcanos (T-VLC) are found in Iceland 
and not in Denmark.

More surprising, most buildings (S-BLDG) are found in Germany, 
farms (S-FRM) in Germany, Norway, Sweden and Iceland, houses 
(S-HSE) in Finland, and huts (S-HUT) in Germany and Norway. 

Iceland is not really a great agricultural nation, it's just a 
tradition that all modest homesteads are called farms.  Perhaps 
just because they have no "real" (German, Danish) farms to compare 
with.

A statistical table is in my diary for June 13,
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/User:LA2


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se