[OSM-talk] [RFC] highway=unclassified currently is too ambiguous, so here's my proposal to fix it.

[Jeffrey Martin]

I haven't been participating for awhile, but wasn't some committee going to
come up
with a solution?

Ideally there would be separate tagging systems for all the different
classes of information, e.g.
surface type, width, number of lanes; route numbers and codes, government
classification,
popularity, etc.; and then the renderer would figure out how to display the
information.

However, in a given area there may only be five or six kinds of roads and it
obviously easier to
collect some kind of general description, e.g. four lane state highway, then
to type in all those details.

Unfortunately people in different areas simply apply whatever label will
give them the rendering they
want instead of fixing the rendering.

On Sat, Aug 8, 2009 at 2:45 AM, Martin Koppenhoefer
<dieterdreist at gmail.com>wrote:

> 2009/8/7 Roy Wallace <waldo000000 at gmail.com>:
> > On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 1:37 AM, Richard
> > Mann<richard.mann.westoxford at googlemail.com> wrote:
> >> As indicated, I've had a go at a rewrite of the unclassified page:
> >> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway%3Dunclassified
>
> > I've added my thoughts to the discussion page. Replicated below:
> >
> > Presently IMHO it's an absolute mess. Try reading the whole page
> > through once, then see if you can explain to someone what it means. Or
> > better yet, get a non-OSM'er to read it and see if they understand.
> > Here's another idea: there appears to be several distinct definitions
> > of the tag in current use, according to talk and talk-au mailing list
> > discussion e.g.
> >
> >   1. urban roads in industrial areas less important than highway=tertiary
> >   2. "something bigger than highway=residential but smaller than
> > highway=tertiary"
> >   3. rural roads less important than highway=tertiary
> >   4. "a road equal to a residential road, but outside residential
> > areas"; "a road roughly equal to residential but without people living
> > there"
> >   5. "the lowest street/road in the interconnecting grid, be it in
> > urban or rural areas"
> >
> > Rather than trying to unify the different usages into one big
> > confusing mess, maybe it would be better to separately explain each
> > current usage? i.e. "This tag is used if the road is A or B or C or D
> > or E". This more closely reflects reality and IMHO will not be any
> > harder to read than the current mess. This could also lead the way to
> > *eventually* replace each different usage with a tag of its own.
>
> I completely agree with Roy. Be it for the mess created as for the
> summary of current use. Let's use this.
>
> cheers,
> Martin
>
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>



-- 
Jeffrey John Martin
dogshed at gmail.com
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