[OSM-talk] Unknown road classifications

[Steve Hill]

When adding roads, you don't always know what classification of road it 
is (e.g. primary, secondary, tertiary, unclassified, etc).  Quite a lot 
of people seem to add these sorts of roads as highway=unclassified, with 
the idea that these can be fixed in the future when the status of the 
road is discovered, but this is wrong since "unclassified" is a real 
road classification.

Is there a recommended way of tagging these roads?  Leaving them 
untagged has a couple of problems: there is no way to later determine 
that the way is a road if it is left completely untagged, and the road 
doesn't get rendered.

It seems silly to take the attitude that this data shouldn't be rendered 
until it is complete - the submitter probably knows lots of useful data 
about the way, such as that it is a road which is accessible to cars, 
the actual classification of the road isn't really as important as 
knowing it is there and that you can drive down it.

Having a highway=unknown_road or similar would also help with people 
tracing yahoo images - render them in a lighter colour so it is obvious 
that the road hasn't been fully mapped.  There are probably 2 groups of 
users who want different things from OSM in this regard:  Mappers want 
to be able to easilly see which bits of the map are complete, so having 
roads which haven't had a proper survey tagged as such is helpful.  Map 
users want as complete a map as possible - knowing that there hasn't 
been a proper survey is useful, but seeing a road with questionable 
accuracy is often more useful than no road at all.

-- 

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

      Servatis a periculum, servatis a maleficum - Whisper, Evanescence