[OSM-talk] [tagging] Road crossings proposal - status?

[Steve Hill]

On Tue, 6 May 2008, Andy Allan wrote:

> [2] Another brilliant example of how people make themselves feel
> useful by doing the trivially easy bit, c.f. tracing from Yahoo with
> no intention of naming the roads.

I'm just going to voice an opinion (feel free to ignore it :) - putting 
roads on the map by any means (e.g. wandering with a GPS, tracing Yahoo, 
etc) is always very useful, even if one doesn't name the roads:

1. If you're doing something like route planning, you don't need to know 
all the names of the roads - just knowing that you can get from A to B via 
this road is useful (although some information about the quality of the 
road is required so you don't direct HGVs up a tiny 1-track lane :)

2. If the road is on the map it becomes much easier for people who are 
familiar with the area to fill in the details such as the name - no 
equipment is needed (such as GPS), they don't need to get off their 
backside and go out to walk/drive the road and there is next to no effort 
in putting a name on a road if you know the area.  I can see that in many 
cases, _users_ (i.e. people who just want a map and would otherwise 
just be using Google) might be happy to add names when using the map 
themselves, but aren't going to spend the time and effort tracing roads 
from Yahoo themselves (for one thing this involves somewhat more 
experience with how OSM works than just adding a name).

Chris Jones (who runs the Welsh language OSM) has been working on an AJAX 
thing to make fixing road names easy without having to understand the 
editors - I see this as a really good thing since it gets more people 
contributing to the project, but it does require that the roads themselves 
are in the database.

  - Steve
    xmpp:steve at nexusuk.org   sip:steve at nexusuk.org   http://www.nexusuk.org/

      Servatis a periculum, servatis a maleficum - Whisper, Evanescence