Re: [Tagging] Road classification

[Andrew Errington]

> From this it sounds like this tagging in OSM is relying too much on
> official classification rather than on real road importance.
>
>
I have always maintained that this is the right way to do it.

Official classification is objective and easy to verify.

"real road importance" is purely subjective, open to argument, and
inconsistent.

I think that for any particular country, the official classification
hierarchy should be mapped on to the OSM hierarchy.  If this is not
sufficient for accurate routing then mappers should add more information,
such as lanes=*, maxspeed=*, width=*, traffic lights and so on.  Routers
can 'prefer' highways that are higher up in the hierarchy, and then
penalise sections of the routes that have narrow roads, fewer lanes, or
lower maxspeeds.

Best wishes,

Andrew
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Re: [Tagging] Road classification

[Mateusz Konieczny]

On Wed, 2 Sep 2015 16:32:07 +0900
Andrew Errington  wrote:

> > From this it sounds like this tagging in OSM is relying too much on
> > official classification rather than on real road importance.
> >
> >
> I have always maintained that this is the right way to do it.
> 
> Official classification is objective and easy to verify.
> 
> "real road importance" is purely subjective, open to argument, and
> inconsistent.
> 
> I think that for any particular country, the official classification
> hierarchy should be mapped on to the OSM hierarchy.  If this is not
> sufficient for accurate routing then mappers should add more
> information, such as lanes=*, maxspeed=*, width=*, traffic lights and
> so on.  Routers can 'prefer' highways that are higher up in the
> hierarchy, and then penalise sections of the routes that have narrow
> roads, fewer lanes, or lower maxspeeds.

So footway that is National Road (happens in Japan, already mentioned
in this thread) should be tagged as highway=trunk?

Generally following official classification is a good idea (otherwise
it will be inconsistent) but some exceptions should be expected.

Also, there are many ways to map official classification on to OSM
hierarchy. At least sometimes the simplest form of mapping will not be
the best one.

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Re: [Tagging] Road classification

[Lauri Kytömaa]

Andrew Errington wrote:
> I think that for any particular country, the official classification
> hierarchy should be mapped on to the OSM hierarchy.  If this is not

Countries are different in this regard. For example, here we use the
official classification for all rural state operated roads, and they can
be identified just by which range the road number is in (1-29, 40-98,
and so on). (Being a motorway overrides this "by-number" system.)

However, in that system, "officially" most urban roads are just roads
with numbers over 10 000 (generally not signposted) and
undistinguishable from each other; sometimes the main road
through a city is state operated, sometimes just guideposted as
"route to road #n". So in urban areas, unless the state classification
calls for a higher class, the local mappers have to consider which
roads are "important regional roads" (trunk), "regional road / arterial",
"minor arterial", "collector roads" - the rest are below tertiary. For
each class, there's a list of hints to compare when unsure. It
could, and did in some places take some iterations before some
suburbs had a consistent hierarchy, but the result is added value
from the local contributors.


-- 
alv

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Re: [Tagging] Road classification

[Paul Johnson]

On Wed, Sep 2, 2015 at 3:40 AM, Mateusz Konieczny 
wrote:

> Generally following official classification is a good idea (otherwise
> it will be inconsistent) but some exceptions should be expected.
>
> Also, there are many ways to map official classification on to OSM
> hierarchy. At least sometimes the simplest form of mapping will not be
> the best one.
>

This is the problem we're running into with the revision request I posted
to osm-us earlier tonight...
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Re: [Tagging] Proposed mechanical edit: surface=soil to surface=dirt (history (authors of changesets))

[Mateusz Konieczny]

On Tue, 01 Sep 2015 23:55:14 +0200
"André Pirard"  wrote:

> On 2015-08-31 20:12, � wrote :
> > On Mon, 31 Aug 2015, Mateusz Konieczny wrote:
> >
> >> On Mon, 31 Aug 2015 12:55:27 +0200
> >> moltonel 3x Combo  wrote:
> >>
> >>> On 31/08/2015, Mateusz Konieczny  wrote:
>  Is there some method to automate finding who introduced tags?
>  Doing it manually would not be worth the effort. On the other
>  hand - running script to detect users (and/or relevant
>  changesets) may be a good idea.
> >>> curl -s
> >>> 'http://overpass-api.de/api/interpreter?data=%5Bout%3Ajson%5D%5Btimeout%3A25%5D%3B%0A%28%0A%20%20node%5B%22surface%22%3D%22soil%22%5D%3B%0A%20%20way%5B%22surface%22%3D%22soil%22%5D%3B%0A%20%20relation%5B%22surface%22%3D%22soil%22%5D%3B%0A%29%3B%0Aout%20meta%3B'
> >>> | grep user | sort| uniq -c
> >>>
> >>> or
> >>>
> >>> http://overpass-turbo.eu/?w=%22surface%22%3D%22soil%22+global
> >>> (and add 'meta' to the output to extract the user/changeset)
> >>>
> >>> These have the usual drawback that they only return who last
> >>> touched the object, not who introduced a particular tag. It gets
> >>> more complicated to do things exactly right, but this is a good
> >>> starting point.
> >> Getting latest person who edited object is really easy. The
> >> history is main problem - is there some API for getting old
> >> version for given objects with user/changeset that edited it?
> > At least the main API can give you the old versions of the object
> > in .osm using:
> >
> > http://www.openstreetmap.org/api/0.6/node/$i/$v
> 
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/api/0.6/node/3157502486/history
> 
> will return the complete list (history) of authors, changesets and
> dates for a given element.

Yes, this would work (some parsing still would be needed). Unfortunately
according to http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/API_usage_policy it is
not OK to use API for that purpose.

Who should be contacted to change rules to allow limited read-only or
to get exemption from this rules? DWG? OSMF? Open ticket on
https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website ?

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Re: [Tagging] Road classification

[Mateusz Konieczny]

On Wed, 02 Sep 2015 06:54:04 +0900
John Willis  wrote:

> 
> 
> > On Sep 1, 2015, at 9:46 PM, Paul Johnson 
> > wrote:
> > 
> > presently traverses a staircase!
> 
> I currently forget which, but a national road in Japan officially
> becomes a staircase near its terminus, as the government managed
> "road" is significant older than cars, and for historical reasons,
> the staircase is legally considered part of the road. 
> 
> There are some national primary/trunk roads that have a modern
> tertiary bypass, but the 200 year old primary bypassed section that
> goes down a "toboggan route" down a mountain or narrows to less than
> 2 meters is still considered the primary/trunk route for the same
> reasons - which is a real pain to reconcile. 

From this it sounds like this tagging in OSM is relying too much on
official classification rather than on real road importance.

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Re: [Tagging] Road classification

[Daniel Koć]

W dniu 02.09.2015 15:55, John Willis napisał(a):


But - most importantly - this implementation is what japanese people
expect and require from their maps, as the shape of the roads gives
users a spatial awareness of where they are - and changing those roads
means making an "inferior" map.


Looks like Japanese may be especially interested in joining the 
area:highway party - Poles, Germans and Ukrainians are here already 
(Russians have their own a:h party, but I'm not sure if they follow the 
fashion, because it's evolving) =} :


http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Street_area#Real_data_rendering_examples

but please BYOS (Bring Your Own Server) for rendering a:h layers, 
because osmapa.pl is not able to serve any more countries than it does 
now. It should be no problem to use this code on other servers, however.


It also means that real importance could be tagged one day instead of 
"official" importance, so we have at least something proper once people 
will have what they really want anyway. =}


--
"The train is always on time / The trick is to be ready to put your bags 
down" [A. Cohen]


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Re: [Tagging] Proposed mechanical edit: surface=soil to surface=dirt

[Mateusz Konieczny]

On Wed, 2 Sep 2015 22:28:08 -0700
Bryce Nesbitt  wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 31, 2015 at 3:33 AM, Mateusz Konieczny
>  wrote:
> 
> >
> > Is there some method to automate finding who introduced tags? Doing
> > it manually would not be worth the effort. On the other hand -
> > running script to detect users (and/or relevant changesets) may be
> > a good idea.
> 
> 
> Yes.
> I find the stuff in taginfo, then load it in overpass turbo, export to
> JOSM, and
> use this dialog : https://josm.openstreetmap.de/ticket/11413
> That's a patch I wrote for JOSM that takes the current selection, and
> counts up the users who make edits.

It finds people who were last to edit given object, not people who
added given tag.

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Re: [Tagging] Proposed mechanical edit: surface=soil to surface=dirt

[Bryce Nesbitt]

On Mon, Aug 31, 2015 at 3:33 AM, Mateusz Konieczny 
wrote:

>
> Is there some method to automate finding who introduced tags? Doing it
> manually would not be worth the effort. On the other hand - running
> script to detect users (and/or relevant changesets) may be a good idea.


Yes.
I find the stuff in taginfo, then load it in overpass turbo, export to
JOSM, and
use this dialog : https://josm.openstreetmap.de/ticket/11413
That's a patch I wrote for JOSM that takes the current selection, and
counts up the users who make edits.


There are definitely other ways of doing it.
---
If I'm correcting typos with a mechanical edit, and I see a few users that
dominate the ratings,
then I'll send them changeset notices.  My rule of thumb is if it seems
like one off mistake, I don't bother.
If it seems like a pattern, I reach out.
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Re: [Tagging] Access tags (general question, but mostly regarding bicycle)

[Bryce Nesbitt]

On Sat, Aug 29, 2015 at 6:39 AM, Richard  wrote:

> Just wondered - when did anyone here last see a wheelchair=no road sign?
> Is any
> of these 214658 tags correct?
> http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/?key=wheelchair=no


wheelchair=no is defined by http://wheelmap.org/ conventions, and is a
suitability tag, not an access tag.
Thus you'd never write "access:wheelchair=no", where you might write
"access:foot=no".


-

The project I think would benefit from separating legal and suitability
access tags,
and from introducing namespaces.


Suitability tags are tricky and subjective.  For that reason they should be
more than yes/no,
perhaps following something more like sac_scale.
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Re: [Tagging] Road classification

[John Willis]

Javbw

> On Sep 3, 2015, at 12:17 AM, Daniel Koć  wrote:
> 
> It also means that real importance could be tagged one day instead of 
> "official" importance, so we have at least something proper once people will 
> have what they really want anyway. =}

Rant:

I agree that importance is very important. But not everyone agrees. 

I mentioned "importance" on the -carto github page (rendering mountain icons 
based on a tagged "importance" score or something), and gravitystorm informed 
me that it is unmappable because it is unverifiable, linking to a "verifiable 
knowledge" page on the wiki. 

It is verifiable. It just that it is not documented in a neat tidy way. 

We can't even separate hills from mountains because they are all "peaks" for 
some reason. 

I mean, a 30m tall hill called "fujiyama" (there are hundred or more little "Mt 
fuji" hills and mountains throughout Japan) and the iconic Mt Fuji have the 
same name, characters (富士山), icon, and rendering in OSM. This particular name 
issue famously led some Chinese tourists to my small town looking to climb Mt 
Fuji, and they arrived at"base of mt fuji" train station (fujiyamashita) - 
which is below a hill that takes 5 minutes to walk up. It is a national joke. 
Google Uses it in ads to show off Android. 

It obviously is known and documented that this hill is less important. But 
making one icon render at z8 and one render at z15 is not allowed, because it 
is "unverifiable". ><

 OSM is stuffed full of value judgements - but the ones that could improve 
renderings on tiny, large, and iconic non-manmade items the most is not 
allowed. 

Labeling Denali or the Grand Canyon or Mt Everest or other natural landmarks 
*correctly* requires a value judgement by someone. Every online map does this. 
Someone put the special "mt fuji" icon in Apple Maps for a reason. Ot is an 
internationally famous peak. 

It requires prioritizing their rendering over other mountains, and their own 
sub-peaks. And cluttering the map with peak icons that appear and disappear all 
at the same zoom level gives no idea as to the size, visibility, cultural 
importance, nor landmark status of the peaks and other natural features. 

I purchased a USA map that won a national mapping contest - this 1 guy spent 
years choosing features to include and exclude - highest points, POIs, and 
historic features - his map beat out NatGeo and other maps in the contest. It 
is beautiful. 

Capturing local / regional information on what should and shouldn't be shown at 
certain zoom levels - importance - makes a better map.

Ignoring it seems to be the exact opposite of OSM's mission to capture local 
knowledge to make a superior map. 

Javbw
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Re: [Tagging] Feature Proposal - Voting - indoormark=beacon

[François Lacombe]

Hi Guillermo

Sorry for the mistake, it's ok.

Good luck for the vote ;)


François

*François Lacombe*

fl dot infosreseaux At gmail dot com
www.infos-reseaux.com
@InfosReseaux 

2015-09-01 22:26 GMT+02:00 Guillermo Amat :

> Hello
>
> Thank you for your comments. Please, look at the dates again, it has been
> a month since the RFC was published and reported to this mailing list :)
>
> RFC
> 
>  start:2015-07-30Vote
> 
>  start:2015-09-01
>
> 2015-09-01 20:26 GMT+02:00 François Lacombe :
>
>> Hello
>>
>> It looks like a well built proposal and the tagging scheme can be
>> extended with other keys depending on the case.
>>
>> Only one comment : it's bad to make the RFC last only one little day
>>
>>
>> All the best
>> François Lacombe
>>
>> fl dot infosreseaux At gmail dot com
>> www.infos-reseaux.com
>> @InfosReseaux
>>
>>
>> 2015-09-01 15:56 GMT+02:00 Guillermo Amat :
>> > Hello
>> >
>> > Voting process opened for indoormark=beacon proposal
>> >
>> >
>> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/indoormark%3Dbeacon
>> >
>> > Regards
>> >
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Re: [Tagging] Proposed mechanical edit: surface=soil to surface=dirt (history (authors of changesets))

[André Pirard]

  
  
On 2015-09-02 08:34, Mateusz Konieczny
  wrote :


  On Tue, 01 Sep 2015 23:55:14 +0200
"André Pirard"  wrote:


  
On 2015-08-31 20:12, � wrote :


  On Mon, 31 Aug 2015, Mateusz Konieczny wrote:


  
On Mon, 31 Aug 2015 12:55:27 +0200
moltonel 3x Combo  wrote:



  On 31/08/2015, Mateusz Konieczny  wrote:

  
Is there some method to automate finding who introduced tags?
Doing it manually would not be worth the effort. On the other
hand - running script to detect users (and/or relevant
changesets) may be a good idea.

  
  curl -s
'http://overpass-api.de/api/interpreter?data="">'
| grep user | sort| uniq -c

or

http://overpass-turbo.eu/?w=%22surface%22%3D%22soil%22+global
(and add 'meta' to the output to extract the user/changeset)

These have the usual drawback that they only return who last
touched the object, not who introduced a particular tag. It gets
more complicated to do things exactly right, but this is a good
starting point.


Getting latest person who edited object is really easy. The
history is main problem - is there some API for getting old
version for given objects with user/changeset that edited it?

  
  At least the main API can give you the old versions of the object
in .osm using:

http://www.openstreetmap.org/api/0.6/node/$i/$v



http://www.openstreetmap.org/api/0.6/node/3157502486/history

will return the complete list (history) of authors, changesets and
dates for a given element.

  
  
Yes, this would work (some parsing still would be needed). Unfortunately
according to http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/API_usage_policy it is
not OK to use API for that purpose.


What policy, what purpose, that's unclear?
Is OSM.org using that API to display the history on the screen
illegal?
Is Osmose using it to attribute errors to some user illegal?
Yep, I suppose that making oneself a complete list of OSM users is
inappropriate.

Regarding the needed parsing:  use regex (as in perl again): it does
wonders!
If you need regex drill, install it in some editor like Advanced
Find/Replace plugin for gedit. Gorgeous.
(there are packages to handle xml more correctly but regex is OK for
that kind of predictable, repetitive data.)


  

  André.

  



  


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Re: [Tagging] Buildings mixing residential and commercial use

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

sent from a phone

> Am 31.08.2015 um 22:38 schrieb Daniel Koć :
> 
> Current Simple 3D Buildings specification basically tells to slice the 
> buildings with building:levels=* and building:min_level=*, so we better use 
> this notation.


yes, kind of like this is the way. I must admit that I don't support the levels 
and building:min_level combination idea, building:levels should be the amount 
of levels for the object it is tagged on, not a difference between assumed 
floors below and a min level tag.

Let me illustrate this with an example: there is a building with 7 floors where 
the floors 4+5 are a building part to be tagged, the simple 3d model would ask 
to add
building:levels=6 on this part (which is actually only 2 storeys) together with 
building:min_level=5 (shifted by one due to the ground floor). I don't find 
this particularly intuitive and reject especially the concept of adding a 
building:levels=6 tag for 2 floors (you can figure this out only when looking 
at more than one tag at once). This even gets undefined in case of bridge 
buildings with different amount of levels below each side (different terrain or 
storey height) or split level buildings below (unclear amount of storeys).


cheers 
Martin 
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Re: [Tagging] Road classification

[John Willis]

> On Sep 2, 2015, at 4:19 PM, Mateusz Konieczny  wrote:
> 
> From this it sounds like this tagging in OSM is relying too much on
> official classification rather than on real road importance.

And similar to someone printing out an email and faxing it to someone, we have 
reached a cultural impasse that the Japanese (big giant stereotype incoming) 
impose upon themselves - because in so many aspects of their lives - the 
paperwork or ceremony or existing standard is vastly more important than the 
people holding the paperwork, people in the ceremony, or a new method that 
makes the old standard useless (looking at you, fax machine!). This has 
benefits but also tremendous technology drawbacks. 

The map honoring the roads is vastly more important than the people using them. 
You eventually end up using width as a yardstick more than anything - which is 
why  (good) Japanese maps are all area based at high zoom levels - no lines, 
all areas - so you can see that a road to the train station is so small that 
your minivan cannot fit through the walls along the road in the middle. 

The actualities on the ground means a bypass road should be built, but come 
hell, high water, or a 20% incline on a hairpin turn on road 2 meters thick - 
that is a primary road - because the road has always been one for 150 years, so 
why change the paperwork? The paperwork is more important than representing 
reality. The smooth two-lane road with shoulders bypass road 100 years newer is 
obviously a tertiary.  

This greatly affects googles (representation of the roads at lower zoom (where 
they rely on googles in-house line-vector mapping style rather than Zenrin's 
area based representation), though they don't try nearly as hard as OSM to 
render all the different grades of road, so the mismatches can be even more 
pronounced. 

But - most importantly - this implementation is what japanese people expect and 
require from their maps, as the shape of the roads gives users a spatial 
awareness of where they are - and changing those roads means making an 
"inferior" map. 

Javbw. 
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Re: [Tagging] Proposed mechanical edit: surface=soil to surface=dirt (history (authors of changesets))

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 02/09/2015, Mateusz Konieczny  wrote:
> On Tue, 01 Sep 2015 23:55:14 +0200
> "André Pirard"  wrote:
>> http://www.openstreetmap.org/api/0.6/node/3157502486/history
>>
>> will return the complete list (history) of authors, changesets and
>> dates for a given element.
>
> Yes, this would work (some parsing still would be needed). Unfortunately
> according to http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/API_usage_policy it is
> not OK to use API for that purpose.

I actually think using the API for that purpose is perfectly within
the usage policy:
* The ultimate goal is to edit OSM, by knowing who introduced a tag
and contacting him
* Contributors already do this all the time from within the editor,
only one object at a time
* Typical usage (on an ad-hoc basis and < 1000 objects) should be low
enough. While it can potentially be heavy enough to break the usage
policy, this is a separate issue of how the tool is used rather than
what the tool does.

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Re: [Tagging] [OSM-talk] Proposed mechanical edit: surface=soil to surface=dirt

[Friedrich Volkmann]

On 01.09.2015 10:38, Anders Fougner wrote:
> My proposal in case someone wants to help beginners with the surface tag:
> *Illustrate* the surface hierarchy somewhere in the OSM wiki (e.g. at
> ).
> Right now the hierarcy is not illustrated, it is just in two tables (unpaved
> and paved). An illustration works better, and the hierarchy can have more
> than two levels.
> 
> Place surface=paved and surface=unpaved at the top, surface=ground etc on
> the next level and probably surface=wood, clay, mud, etc. at the bottom.

It's similar to the access hierarchy, so we could illustrate the tree in the
same way.

However, be aware that the more levels you create, the more likely we'll
encounter the multiple-parents problem. E.g. when we declare a group for
natural surfaces and one for artificial surfaces, then we need to put gravel
and sand into both groups, which makes it too complicated.

-- 
Friedrich K. Volkmann   http://www.volki.at/
Adr.: Davidgasse 76-80/14/10, 1100 Wien, Austria

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Re: [Tagging] [OSM-talk] Proposed mechanical edit: surface=soil to surface=dirt

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 02/09/2015, Friedrich Volkmann  wrote:
> On 01.09.2015 10:13, moltonel 3x Combo wrote:
>> But as a user of surface=soil, could you tell me what difference you
>> see between soil and earth (from an osm POV) ? To me, those two are
>> actual osm synonyms, but 'earth' is documented and 55x more popular.
>
> See my other message (Message-ID: <55e55c3e.8010...@volki.at>). Earth is
> documented, but with a wrong descripion, which is worse than no
> documentation at all. I prefer a tag with an obvious meaning over one which
> is ambiguous, unless there's already lots of applications relying on the
> ambiguous tag.

Well that's the point, it's not obvious at all, otherwise I wouldn't
have asked. Or rather, the obvious (to me) definition of both earth
and soil lead me to believe that they are synonyms for the OSM
usecase.

If the definition is wrong, discuss and correct it. If there's really
a nuance between soil and earth/ground/dirt that make soil usefull as
a distinct value, then document it.

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Re: [Tagging] Buildings mixing residential and commercial use

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

sent from a phone

> Am 31.08.2015 um 23:46 schrieb John Willis :
> 
> Is there some easily understood dividing line between a "building" and a 
> "high-rise building" in OSM or the real world?


I guess it is country specific, maybe even depends on the city or state. In 
Germany the rule is: if the top most level with an "habitable room" (these are 
also defined but for our purposes this would be any room where people live or 
work, excluding storage and facilities) is more than 22m above the surrounding 
terrain it is a high rise.
This rule derives from the length of fire ladders.

cheers 
Martin 
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