[OSM-talk] What's in a road

[Lars Aronsson]

I was thinking along the lines of extracting the line segments
that make up the network of European and major Swedish national
roads that I've mapped, and to present them as an ESRI shapefile
or some similar GIS packaging.  These include roads with one or
two digit numbers, e.g. E4, E20, Rv51, but not three digit roads
(Swedish county-level roads).

But where does one road end, and the next one begin?  If I include
a motorway, should I also include its exits?  And how much of the
connecting roads?  Everything within 1 km?  Or nothing at all?
Should the connecting ramps be treated as a separate layer?

And where exactly in a town center does a road end?  Where in
Linköping do roads 34, 35, and 36 end?

Is anybody adding attributes (labels, tags) to line segments for
British and German motorways, to facilitate such an extraction?
Do you add special attributes to the connecting ramps, so you can
separate them from the actual road?


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