[OSM-talk] Highway tagging in general around the world

[Steve Coast]

On 15 Aug 2007, at 07:25, Jeffrey Martin wrote:

> After seeing the Australian post and making my own Korean post I  
> started reading
> what I could find on the wiki.
>
> I think it's obvious that we need to plan for a system that will  
> work for every
> highway system around the world.

No I think that's super dumb. It's never going to work, ask the OGC.

If in the UK we have M, A and B roads. If in country X you have T, F  
and D roads then just tag them that way.

If you want the system to magically know that an M road in the UK is  
kind of like a autobahn in Germany or a freeway in the US then a tag  
equivalence scheme is the way to go, or something like that  
(something that says highway:motorway is the same as (or  
approximately) highway:autobahn). If you want to make your roads  
render on the map then either tag them with the Map_Features scheme  
(that is, give up) or fix osm.xml to draw your roads correctly (my  
choice).

There is no One True Ontology. Don't try to bend reality to a schema/ 
ontology, just tag as reality and bend the tools (the renderers, etc).

have fun,

SteveC | steve at asklater.com | http://www.asklater.com/steve/