[OSM-talk] Unknown road classifications

[80n]

highway=road

This is suitably vague, but has a clear enough meaning.

80n

On Sun, May 11, 2008 at 11:21 AM, Steve Hill <steve at nexusuk.org> wrote:

>
> 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 <xmpp%3Asteve at nexusuk.org>
> sip:steve at nexusuk.org <sip%3Asteve at nexusuk.org>   http://www.nexusuk.org/
>
>      Servatis a periculum, servatis a maleficum - Whisper, Evanescence
>
>
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