[OSM-talk] non-temporary usage of highway=road

Simon Poole simon at poole.ch
Tue Sep 27 06:07:37 UTC 2016


Aun

The use of highway=road goes back to before we had access to aerial
imagery. Often you would simply have a raw GPX track without any further
meta-data and you might simply wanted to indicate that there might be
something there for later survey and there was neither the amount of
correct road data nor the tools we have available at this point in time.

Use of it, IMHO, doesn't really make sense at all any more, particularly
if you have imagery available, a conservative best guess plus a fixme
tag would seem to be much more useful. We shouldn't forget that way back
we were limited by the speed at which we could add geometry, these days
it's, even with humans doing it :-), the fast bit of adding data to OSM
and it rarely makes sense to do so in advance if there is no way to
infer at least basic meta data or you are doing it immediately before a
survey. 

QA tools and editors already tend to report/highlight such ways (iD
perhaps not), finding them shouldn't be an issue.

Simon


Am 27.09.2016 um 03:42 schrieb Aun Johnsen:
> I see a lot of usage of the generic tag highway=road, which is meant as a temporary tag and a “low level entry tag” for beginners. The problem with this is that because of its ambiguous meaning, it is impossible for data consumers to process this correctly. 
>
> i.e., highway=road means anything between a small footway to motorway, so a routing engine might wrongfully send cars down a set of steps or a hiker up a motorway
>
> As described on the proposal page, this tag is meant to be temporary until more data can be obtained from survey.
>
> I have now had a few rounds of cleanup of the usage of this tag in Brazil. My cleanup run last year found highway=road that had been unedited for 3 years, so hardly temporary. This year I found several highway=road added by armchair mappers from Europe, and I doubt they ever will travel to the remote areas of Brazil to correct this.
>
> I am still in progress of checking each of these elements manually, I started this years cleaning with more than 3600 highway road in Brazil alone, roughly 14 months after I had completely cleaned Brazil the last time.
>
> In my opinion, a warning about its temporary state and non-capability with data consumers should be added to the wiki, and it should be removed from the standard presets of all the common editors. Also editors with validation functions should give a warning about the existence of this temporary tag so that it can be dealt with properly by people editing in the areas, and further QA tools should highlight them as items needing attention.
>   
> Aun Johnsen
>
>
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