[OSM-talk] Permissive or Suggested

Mike Collinson mike at ayeltd.biz
Sun Feb 11 08:12:31 GMT 2007


Just got back from a few days in the field mapping OSM's first 
tropical island; tough, but someone's got to do it.  This looked like 
an interesting thread so some comments below

At 09:05 AM 7/02/2007, Ben Robbins wrote:
>Having it posible to add accsess rules for everything individually is a good
>idea, because anything can be covered.  But as I have read many times in old
>osm stuff There should be predefined tags for commonly used things, and then
>a string of indivudally charactoristics so that people are free to discribe
>a way that  doesn't have a predefined state.  I almost never use the
>indivdual access tags as predefined other tags make it clear, and its easy
>to render them without having a long list of condisions.*
>
>Permissive=footway
>Highway=footway
>Suggested=footway
>
>This does seem strange because of the way I (and everyone) have been tagging
>for ages.  But then Highway to me seem like the group is stating that all
>the features under its name are of highway status, meaning they have the
>legal access rights of the following.  Therfore on the same principle a
>Permisiive group would mean that all the features under its name are of
>permissive status (again varying).  And the same for the rest.  In that
>sence it is more consitent with how the highway tag is mostly used.

At 07:55 AM 7/02/2007, Dave wrote:
permissive= seems completely backwards to me. Tags in my head go, 
property_category=actual_value. permissive is a value not a category 
-- the category here is access=permissive. Complicating this is that 
you can have 4 or 5 things with differing restrictions, so we do 
foot=permissive for pedestrian access, should probably actually be 
foot_access=permissive, but that's a minor ah who cares issue.


I think this is one of those where it depends on which end of the 
telescope we look down.  If the "category" is thought of as "group 
of"  Ben's suggestion could provide a viable generally useful 
solution.  I'd add already existing "route" tag:

highway= the group of legal or apparently legal rights of way
permissive= the group of private rights of way with some public 
access (e.g.roads in hospitals)
route= the group of formal routes
suggested= the group of informal routes

Jumping ahead in the thread, a solution for a nature trail might be:

highway=footway
route=nature_trail

These could be mapped as one way if always contiguous or as two ways 
if the trail moves from one path to another.

Although I don't pretend to understand all the issues, I'm a firm 
believer that segments are Good Thing and should not be discontinued 
without a lot of thought, and that multiple ways over the same 
segment(s) is Potentially A Good Thing.  We should not get hung up 
rendering issues now.  The job now is easily, consistently and 
logically collect and record information.

Mike
Manila









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