[OSM-talk] New dimension of vandalism

James Livingston doctau at mac.com
Fri Aug 28 12:40:27 BST 2009


On 28/08/2009, at 9:23 PM, Alex Mauer wrote:
> On 08/28/2009 03:46 AM, Gervase Markham wrote:
>> If dieterdriest has found a number of people who've been ignoring the
>> definition,
>
> Nobody (that I know of) has been ignoring the definition.  It's just
> that the definitions didn't match the top-leveldescription.  *None* of
> the definitions of the highway values has ever described the physical
> characteristics of the road, apart from motorway in a very limited  
> sense.

Indeed. I'm wondering how things like "Administrative classification  
in the UK, generally linking larger towns"  (primary, from the  
highway=* page) could possibly be taken as describing the physical  
structure of the road.

Personally, I think that the road hierarchy from trunk down to  
tertiary doesn't really have a strong definition, and that region- 
specific mappings (the International Equivalence table) is what people  
generally go off[0]. The distinction between motorway and trunk seems  
to be somewhat consistent globally, and the sub-tertiary values  
(unclassified, residential, et al) have globally useful definitions,  
even if people don't always agree on what they are.

[0] Although I just had to fix the Australia section to match the  
Australian Tagging Guidelines and what people do. The ABC  
classification mappings were off by one level




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