On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 12:23:03AM +0100, Thomas Wood wrote:
> One concern I have (and one that's probably been expressed many times
> on talk@ etc) is the use of disused=*, rather than adjusting the
> 'primary' tag on the feature. (eg, railway=disused disused=light_rail
> etc)

I think mixing the meaning of those two things is a bad idea. The
concept of "disused" is orthogonal to the concept of "railway type". We
don't write highway=oneway, oneway=primary. Mixing those concepts
together might seem to make things easier, but in the long run it
doesn't. Most software should just ignore everything that has
disused=yes or construction=yes or planned=yes. (And yes, we need a
definite list of all tags that need be ignore for this to work.)

Worse is the assumption that there is a "primary" tag. There is no such
thing, although it might seem that way sometimes. What an object is, is
defined by all tags together, there is not necessarily a "primary" tag.
We don't have a class with attributes, we only have tags. Look for
instance at this example: A new bus platform is build. It gets the tags
highway=footway (because it is part of a footway, too) and
public_transport=platform. But its still under construction. Does it
get tagged as
  highway=construction, construction=footway, public_transport=platform
or
  highway=footway, public_transport=construction, construction=platform
? Both don't make sense, as it seems that only one aspect of this object
is under construction. Using whatever=construction and
construction=whatever_value is a bad idea, it links together concepts
that can not be linked.

This is a wider problem though than the public transport thing and it
must be solved for all cases together.

Jochen
-- 
Jochen Topf  [email protected]  http://www.remote.org/jochen/  +49-721-388298


_______________________________________________
Talk-transit mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-transit

Reply via email to