[OSM-talk] Tagging climbing routes and scrambles
Andy Robinson (blackadder)
blackadderajr at googlemail.com
Wed Apr 23 11:44:13 BST 2008
Steve Hill [mailto:steve at nexusuk.org] wrote:
>Sent: 23 April 2008 11:37 AM
>To: Andy Robinson (blackadder)
>Cc: 'OJ W'; 'OSM Talk'
>Subject: RE: [OSM-talk] Tagging climbing routes and scrambles
>
>On Wed, 23 Apr 2008, Andy Robinson (blackadder) wrote:
>
>> The point has been made by others that the namespace here is unnecessary.
>We
>> know what length= means here so the climbing namespace is superfluous
>> because what you are tagging is a climbing route.
>
>I'm aware the issue is contentious, but no one has said anything to
>convince me that namespacing isn't a good thing (certainly nothing showing
>why it is a bad thing).
>
>> Start to end of section as one way (there may be more than one section in
>> the route, some climbing and some scrambling etc).
>
>I had considered specifying that each pitch (section) must be a different
>way, but concluded that it probably made things unnecessarilly difficult
>since you'd end up with a big cluster of nodes and ways in a very small
>(horizontal) area. Of course, there is nothing stopping people from
>sticking nodes in the middle of the way if that is sensible for specific
>routes (i.e. ones with a large horizontal component).
>
>> climbing routes are no different.
>
>They are different in the fact that they have a much greater vertical
>component and a much smaller horizontal component to almost any other OSM
>features, which makes handling the data in a 2D environment (such as JOSM,
>Potlatch, etc) more difficult. This certainly needs to be taken into
>consideration.
>
>> adjectival:gb= (assuming the same route at the same location requires
>> alternative country grading, if it only applies within the country where
>the
>> route is located then the gb would not be required)
>
>Only the British system has the separate adjectival/technical grades -
>other systems have a single grade to describe the route (the exception
>being YDS, which has 3 separate grades to describe different aspects of
>the route).
>
>It is common to list several different grading systems for the same route
>as well - for example, in the UK, sports routes are often given grades for
>both the British and French grading systems.
>
>> Anything that has lots of namespaces, abbreviations or other non-obvious
>> tagging names makes it much more difficult for data contributors to
>easily
>> add tags.
>
>On the contrary, namespaces make it easier to look up the definitions of
>tags, etc. since there is no chance of being confused with identical tags
>from a different context. I really dislike the way that, without prior
>knowledge, it is impossible to determine the context of the tags if they
>aren't namespaced.
>
>In your example, the context is given by the "footway=climbing" tag. But
>the only way you know this is providing the context of the other tags is
>by some fairly arbitrary prior knowledge - how do you know that the
>context wasn't provided by the "rock=limestone" tag instead?
>
>> Simple and logical appears always to work best.
>
>Indeed, I agree. But we differ on what we believe is "simple and logical"
>- I think clearly declaring the context of the tag is much more simple and
>logical than having a mess of identically named tags, potentially meaning
>totally different things depending on a context provided by another tag
>which isn't obviously providing the context.
>
I'll guess we will agree to disagree then. If it works for you ane the other
climbers amongst the contributors then of course you can do what works for
you :-)
>If there was a *single* "type=" tag that always describes the context of
>the whole object, then I might agree that namespacing is unnecessary, but
>there isn't, so I don't. :)
>
>e.g. type=highway:motorway, type=waterway:river, type=railway:line,
>type=piste, etc.
We would be back where we started 3 years go. "type" is no different from
"class", the previous method of tagging which didn't scale easily.
Cheers
Andy
>
> - Steve
> xmpp:steve at nexusuk.org sip:steve at nexusuk.org
>http://www.nexusuk.org/
>
> Servatis a periculum, servatis a maleficum - Whisper, Evanescence
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