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

[john whelan]

So probably what we need is a set of defaults by country which will cause
no end of debate.

>From a database size setting the default of all highways are
surface=asphalt and lanes=2, and lit in Ottawa would be wonderful but you
need to ask the question what happens when a new inexperienced mapper comes
along?

Cheerio John

On Wed, Apr 6, 2022, 07:59 Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:

> 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"
>
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