[OSM-talk] [Talk-GB] "Unsurfaced road" and "Byway"?

Dave Stubbs osm.list at randomjunk.co.uk
Tue Dec 18 10:23:22 GMT 2007


On 17/12/2007, Ulf Lamping <ulf.lamping at web.de> wrote:
> Sorry, if my response may sound ironic, cynic or even aggressive, but
> your post made me really upset - because I think it's just wrong!

Likewise.

>
> Andy Allan schrieb:
> > I must have missed the point where the discussion / voting system
> > became the *only* way for a tag to appear on the Map Features page. I
> > think widespread use, flawed or not, historical or not, voted on or
> > not, is also sufficient.
> >
> > In fact, if I were to make any comment on the voting system, I would
> > say that nothing should be proposed for voting *until* there is a
> > sufficient use of the tag. I see a awful lot of tags being proposed
> > through someone trying to scratch an itch - which is why you're
> > allowed to use whatever tag you feel like, without having to get
> > things voted on Map Features first.
> So you'll end up with (yes, lot's of these variants were discussed on
> the proposal - and people are very "inventive" to find other variations):
> shop=doityourself, shop=diy, shop=DIY, shop=do_it_yourself,
> shop=do-it-yourself, amenity=doityourself, amenity=diy, shop=hardware &
> type=diy, shop=Baumarkt, ...

No. You won't. Because it's still possible for people to come to
agreement, and to discuss the best way to tag things. You don't /have/
to vote on things for that to happen. Sometimes it helps, so by all
means continue, but often it doesn't so don't expect everyone to
agree.


> [snip]

> > So having nothing other than a cursory flick through my mailing list
> > archives for some approved tags and comparing them with tags that I
> > know haven't gone through the voting process:
> >
> > shop = outdoor ('approved') - 10
> > crossing = toucan (not approved) - 49
> > railway = subway_entrance ('approved') - 224
> > shop = doityourself ('approved') - 22
> > ncn_milepost = * (not approved) - 113
> > amenity = car sharing (approved) - 23
> > rcn = * or rcn_ref = * or route = rcn (none approved) - 2109
> >
> Well, first of all, the rcn are three tags and not only one. You might
> know that these are the same, a newbie (or me) or a computer program
> will - unnecessarily - have a much harder life with it.

rcn is two tags: rcn and rcn_ref -- the route=rcn is just there to
keep the route tag people happy and to provide backwards compatibility
with some existing tagging (mostly for route=ncn actually).
Both serve a purpose, and it was done like that to make it /easier/ to
process on a computer and by a person. And as someone who has entered
about 150 miles of these and renders them, I can tell you that it
works pretty well.


>
> Interestingly, you took approved tags that were approved less than a
> month or so - do you think a freshly approved tag will appear a thousand
> times a day after it was appoved?
> Interestingly, you took "not approved" tags that I don't really
> understand. These tags might make perfect sense to you - for me they
> have no real meaning (I'm not in the UK). What is crossing=toucan,
> ncn_milepost, rcn, ... - a voting process might have found a more
> international recognizable tag than what you are now referring to.

ncn milepost is a completely uk thing.
crossing=toucan is a crossing for bikes... there was a fairly large
e-mail thread about them... it's the official name for that type of
crossing as used by the UK government so is quite useful for cyclists
in the UK. I'm not going over that again... google for the thread.

And again I'll point out that you're talking about discussion and
documentation, not voting. You seem to link one to the other far too
closely.


> > and, of course, the original discussion was about:
> >
> > highway = unsurfaced (not approved) - 1938
> >
> What's unsurfaced? Is this a magical highway that has no surface? Ok,
> more seriously: Am I allowed / is it possible to ride a bike on it? A car?

Oh, does highway type imply an access right too? :-)

>
> In addition we also have tracktype=grade1-5, we have surface=unpaved -
> did I mentioned that all this was *not* approved - and still confuses me?

Don't get me started on tracktype=grade1-5... grrrr... but it's an
interesting case because it's a tag that someone is actually using,
proposed, got some discussion, then got ignored when it came to voting
apart from 3 approvals... so someone put it in map features anyway,
only to be told that no, you can't do that because you need 6
approvals... which starts an argument about democracy and causes
someone else to oppose it (at this point if they had any sense they'd
have created 3 more wiki accounts and voila :-) ).


> > And more importantly, I know that every one of the not-approved tags
> > is not only in use in the database, but even being rendered too (no
> > prizes for guessing where!)
> >
> So all is well now? "I got it rendered and I don't mind if anyone else
> has a problem with it - or don't understand it" - you mean this kind of
> solution?

Except that the cycle map has a key and a "Tagging Guide"... which or
may not help your understanding:
http://www.gravitystorm.co.uk/shine/cycle-info/

> > So lets all be a little less bureaucratic when trying to exclude
> > things from "Map Features", or alternatively return the page to its
> > original use (a useful guide to what tags we use) and take the
> > bureaucracy elsewhere.
> >
> This sounds pretty well, until you think about actually gonna *use* the
> data. It's probably no fun to write a renderer for the 20000 possible
> variations of 200 tag's (not to mention that it's ugly, hard to
> understand, error prone, and slower to work with) - as a result for not
> doing some proposal work "at the beginning".

No, it's about going out and actually doing something then figuring it
out afterwards.
I know some people have a hard time getting their heads round that
one, but the truth is it doesn't end up with 20000 variations because
people want to be able to use their stuff, so they figure out how
things need to be done to work. If we banned voting today, then I
would still go out tomorrow and use highway=motorway for a motorway.

>
>
> There are lot's of tags that seems to be a "no brainer" at first sight,
> but are still not well thought out if you look deeper at it. In my
> experience only 10-20% of the proposals are really "no brainers", often
> someone comes up with a good point that should be taken into account and
> in fact makes the proposal much better - right from the start.
>
> And IMHO it's a much better way to think about possible problems first,
> solve them (where possible) and then use a tag - in comparison to first
> get a plethora of similiar tags and try to sort it out later. People get
> pretty unflexible once they have used a tag for a while so fixing this
> pletora later is difficult or even impossible in OSM ...

That's pretty much true. But I've not really seen this become much of
a problem. You can usually work around it.

Yeah, OSM is not a well oiled machine. So what? It's never going to
be... tbh for people like me that's part of the attraction.

Dave




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