[OSM-talk] residential and unclassified in Australia WAS definition of the main highway-tag

[Renaud Martinet]

After reading the
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Australian_Tagging_Guidelines page,
it strikes me that you are already redefining most of the values for
the highway key. So why would you continue to refer to the
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Map_Features page. I guess that is
because it is available in English.
As Pieren already mentioned, in France we also use some values for
slightly different things that the ones defined in the MapFeatures. We
had to because after translation we don't always come up with
something that we can relate to. Different cultures result in
different features in cities or even in the countryside (think cattle
grids in Scotland for example). So we had to really consider highway
tag values to reflect how important a road is. For the motorway value,
well we have the same type of roads but for most of the others, we had
to slightly change the definition to fit our road network. There has
been a lot of discussion on the talk-fr list but once we came to a
consensus, it was easy to put in place because we have our own
MapFeatures page. Probably you should have one also...

On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 11:26 PM, Martin Koppenhoefer
<dieterdreist at gmail.com> wrote:
> IMHO the highway-class is not about lines on the street, not even
> about width, these are all relative and dependant on local habits.
> It's about structuring your road-grid into different levels. From the
> top-level to the smallest footpath.

I think Martin really has a point here. If you tag the most important
type of road in your country with highway=motorway and that I do the
same in mine, at the end of the day even if physically the roads
aren't the same they are still the most important in both countries.
And I beleive that's what the highway tag is about. The are other tags
to describe the physical attributes of a road or the administrative
classification.

Anyway the MapFeatures are probably still too UK centric, even though
some effort as been made to make it more general. And I can how it's
confusing people in countries where English is spoken but the road
network is radically different from the UK.


Renaud.