[OSM-talk] THIS is the kind of enthusiasm some would reject

[Warin]

On 8/09/2015 6:07 PM, Martin Koppenhoefer wrote:
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> sent from a phone
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>> Am 08.09.2015 um 01:49 schrieb Dave F. <davefox at madasafish.com>:
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>> I don't believe anyone's advocating the removal of existing entities.
>> In your viaduct case above, keep the viaduct entity, remove the railway=abandoned tag, use the historical tag to describe the past of the viaduct (which exists) but don't use it to describe the railway (which doesn't).
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> I believe you are oversimplifying things by just looking at the tracks and if they are there it is some kind of railway and in absence of tracks it has nothing more to do with railway.
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> First of all, we don't currently know a tag for a viaduct entity in OSM, we only have a viaduct property for railway and highway entities (bridge=viaduct) to denote that they are on a viaduct.

The tag bridge=viaduct is not restricted to railways and highways!

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:bridge%3Dviaduct

Viaducts are also used for waterways... ! http://www.chirk.com/aqueduct.html

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> Even if we "had" an established way to tag viaducts independently from ways running over them,

'We' do. Over 43,000 uses of it.

> we would still likely want to tag whether the viaduct was built for roads or for railway.
> IMHO railway=abandoned fits into this idea, and solves these issues.

There are also 'abandoned', 'disused' and 'raised' viaducts ...

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> Before continuing this discussion we should define the possible states we want to map/recognize, i.e. disused, abandoned, (dismantled, razed) and agree on their meaning.
> People continue to write about railway=abandoned as if it described former railways with no traces whatsoever left, while to others it means traces are left.
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To me the states of the thing follow this order

disused ... use has stopped but everything is still in place

abandoned ... no maintenance has been performed for quite some time, possibly some infrastructure has been remove. Vegetation has started growing in a way that would significantly impede use.

raised ... all worthwhile material has been removed. There may still be traces of its past use.