On 20.09.2015 08:45, Pee Wee wrote: > What do you think? > > Is is OK to have (walking) routes in OSM that have no visible marks on the > ground and if so under what conditions?
First of all, we need to distinguish ways and relations. A path may be visible or invisible, and a route may be actually marked/signposted or not. So there are 4 possible combinations. You certainly mean relations for unmarked routes consisting of visible paths, but let's have a look at the opposite combination first: A relation for a marked trail with some section where no path is visible (e.g. crossing a meadow). If we map only what is "verifyable on the ground", as was suggested in some answers, we must not map invisible paths. So we'd end up with incomplete relations that are hardy routable, and whose statistics (length, heigth profile, % paved, etc.) are incorrect. That's why most mappers do map those route segments even though they are not verifyable on the ground. But hang on - are they really not verifyable? There's a marked trail going off one end of the meadow, and a marked trail going off the other side of the meadow. So we do see that the route crosses the meadow. We do not see the invisible path, but we see that there *is* an invisible path. It is verifyable or not, depending on how we think about it. I recently mapped a climbing route that is invisible from start to end. But is has been documented in climbing guides for decades. I was able to identify the rocks, ravines etc. described in the books. So the route is verifyable on the ground - but only in conjunction with the climbing guides. If all of these get lost in a fire, the verifyability will also be gone. But hey, that's the same for the names of peaks, ridges, valleys etc. There's no sign "Mount Everest" on the peak of the Mount Everest. The peak is verifyable on the ground, its name is not. We map the names because they are common knowledge. The climbing route I mapped has been common knowledge as well. A hiking route suggested in one single book by one single author can hardly be considered common knowledge, especially if the the route is just a combination of paths that were already known before. That kind of routes do not belong in OSM. I should also mention that I did not create a relation for the climbing route mentioned above. I just mapped the highway=path. Why would we need a relation if the route is not marked, and all the other tags can be set on the ways directly? Looking at the relations I found via your first link (rel-id 2099391, 4108560), I wonder what tags are supposed to justify a relation. What do ref=*, name=*, colour=* etc. mean when the route is neither marked nor signposted in situ? Is ref=4b the page number in the book? Is name=PP_5 the chapter in the book? Is colour=aqua the colour in the book? What about isbn=978-2-930488-18-9? A route cannot have an ISBN. So that's obviously the ISBN of the book. This is cleary a misuse of OSM. OSM is a database for geographic data, not a book index. These relations need to be removed, there's nothing to discuss about that. -- Friedrich K. Volkmann http://www.volki.at/ Adr.: Davidgasse 76-80/14/10, 1100 Wien, Austria _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
