[OSM-talk] Proliferation of path vs. footway

[Mike Harris]

Roy

Interesting - I'd not looked at that one. I have myself already been
confusing the wiki pages for 'designated' and 'designation'. The one that I
tend to favour in terms of my own mapping (heavily oriented towards off-road
and tights of way in England) is 'designation'
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Designation . This
works  quite well for me - when used as an expression of formal legal
status, together with the "existing apparently most common practice in
England" of using highway=footway/bridleway/byway/track/path/cycleway as the
primary tag + foot/bicycle/horse/motorcar=yes/no as a description of the
situation on the ground and/or signed + surface= or tracktype= for the
actual condition as seen on the ground + access= used only in a limited way
to indicate privacy or similar restrictions. I got there by an evolutionary
process and it does seem to cover most of what I need. But I would be the
first to admit that that doesn't make it right for anyone else or 'right' in
any 'absolute' sense. What the use of designation= helped most with was
separating out a description of legal/administrative status (mostly derived
from publicly available and non-copyright sources developed by highway
authorities) from the more usual description of what was 'on the ground' or
could be deduced from signage. The latter is of general utility; the more
legal stuff is very useful for those of us concerned with rights of way in
England and Wales and is also slowly making OSM more useful to local
authorities (and others who have their own problems with over-enthusiastic
OS licensing). It also adds something to OSM that is NOT on OS maps - as
they their recording of rights of way is quite often very out of date and
quite often erroneous.

Happy mapping anyway!

Mike Harris

-----Original Message-----
From: Roy Wallace [mailto:waldo000000 at gmail.com] 
Sent: 15 August 2009 23:37
To: Mike Harris
Cc: talk at openstreetmap.org; Nick Whitelegg
Subject: Re: [OSM-talk] Proliferation of path vs. footway

On Sat, Aug 15, 2009 at 6:08 PM, Mike Harris<mikh43 at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Roy
>
> Could you give reference to your wiki quote? I can see for =designated at:
>
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:access%3Ddesignated
>
> QUOTE
>
> "This tag indicates that a route has been specially designated 
> (typically by a government) for use by a particular mode (or modes) of
transport."
>
> UNQUOTE
>
> There is apparently, perhaps unsurprisingly, some ambiguity in the wiki.

Sure - my quotes were from:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:access. This needs to be cleared up.