Hi Paul and Greg and talk-us, Your points regarding tagging of gravel roads, highway vs. path vs. trail, and vehicle choice are points that come up in the OSM community from time to time. For further discussion and to see how previous discussions have resolved, consider looking up the discussion on the smoothness tag, the thread on track vs. path on the talk-list, and the very excellent presentation from SotM by Peter Miller called Community Smoothness.
In many cases these issues boil down to a couple of points. First, a map is an abstraction and can never reflect all of reality in pristine perfection. Second, we as mappers can't be expert in all of the ways to map all of the wide world. Third, we can not predict all of the ways our data will be used by the present and future users of OSM. Having One True Way to map each thing makes no sense because it fails to consider context. And context changes, sometimes drastically, depending on location. So while you are discussing specific roads in Massachusetts and Oregon, and finding the things are a bit different for each of you, imagine how your argument applies to roads at McMurdo Station on Antarctica or in a rain forest, or on a desert? Things are Just Too Different. So we as a community have to trust ourselves. We have to trust our local experts. We have to grow more local experts by having these conversations and improving how we tag things in the local context and in the wider context. And in some ways we have to Just Do Our Best. It won't always be perfect and that is okay. There is a history in OSM of saying that if you tag it to reflect the reality on the ground, then that is okay. Even if it is unusual. So if highway=residential; surface=gravel/unpaved/unsurfaced makes sense? Use it. If highway=track; track_type=2 makes sense? Use it! And don't let anybody tell you that you are wrong, just because they wouldn't do it that way. So, by all means, continue the discussion. You may both be right. Best regards, Richard _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
