[OSM-talk] Good practice, and should we rely on defaults?

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

my thought is that, in general, the default should not be added to OSM. 
For example, I don't want 95% of streets in Germany to receive a 
surface=asphalt or a motor_vehicle=yes!

(And I sure as hell don't want someone helpfully adding all those with a 
bot or a mindless editing campaign where mappers go "ah, what can go 
wrong, I'll just tag the default"!)

However, there can be situations where these tags could make sense even 
in Germany, for example when there's a little piece of asphalted road in 
the midst of cobblestone segments - I would definitely put a 
surface=asphalt there to avoid someone else coming along and thinking 
"ah, this little gap in the cobblestone is surely there by accident..."

We need to establish good ways to make country-wide (or region-wide) 
defaults available in a machine-readable way. Tagging those defaults 
onto every single object in one country because the default in this 
country might be different from the default in the next country would 
(a) create too much data inflation and (b) mean an edit orgy every time 
the default changes in a place.

For the same reason I am also opposed to mapping implicit speed limits, 
even though I see that that information can be useful in the absence of 
machine-readable regional defaults.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"