[OSM-talk] NoName

[Ben Laenen]

On Sunday 14 September 2008, Gervase Markham wrote:
> Shaun McDonald wrote:
> > The nonames map is hosted by CloudMade, we update them from the
> > planet file each week. The updates typically appear on a Thursday.
>
> What is the official way (read: "way that the map will recognise) of
> marking a road to say that it actually doesn't have a name, and so
> shouldn't appear as "name missing" on the map?

I was just thinking about a similar issue, but with speed limits. How do 
you tag the fact that there is no speed limit sign on a road (i.e. the 
road has the default speed limit.

Surely I could tag with that default speed limit, but suppose the 
government changes that default speed limit, I can no longer 
distinguish between roads that had a speed limit sign and those without 
it so I cannot automatically fix all the speed limits that have 
changed. (Note that this is not that exotic, our government is thinking 
about lowering default maximum speed, and it has happened in the past 
already). I could also leave out the maxspeed tag, but then we risk 
that several people will go to the street to look for it, just like 
when there's no name for the road.

I guess there are more issues like this where a feature is absent, and 
where we need some way to tag this as absent. A noname=yes tag works ok 
for names, but not for anything else, so we need something more 
flexible. Perhaps add a "n/a" value to the tags?

Greetings
Ben