[OSM-talk] Country Specific Route Markers

[Darryl Shpak]

Brent Easton wrote:
> Could someone post a brief summary of the the current state of play with country-specific route marking (i.e. showing the correct highway/state/tourist route shields) in both Mapnik and Osmarender?
>
> Is there a wiki page for this?
>
> Is there a consensus on the best way to encode this information now?
>
> We have developed a scheme to use in Australia to mark Australian routes using a ref:au= tag:
>
>   

In Canada, we've been simply using ref= to hold the highway numbers, and 
highway=trunk/primary/secondary/etc. to specify the legal status of the 
road. For instance, in my province, Manitoba, the highway network can be 
broken down into:

National highway system highways (highway=trunk)
Provincial trunk highways (highway=primary)
Provincial roads (highway=secondary)

Then, I use ref= to hold the highway number. The general idea is to use 
generic/standard tags as much as possible, so that any renderer or route 
planner or other tool can understand them. Then, we want to create 
country- or province-specific rules for the renderers, which would be 
able to draw these generic tags in a localized manner (drawing the ref 
numbers for the various classes of highway in the correct shield).

- Darryl