At 2010-09-01 07:06, Phil! Gold wrote:
The railway portion of the US TIGER import seems to have used the owner of
the railroad for the name= tag. (And the owners appear to have been
collected over the course of decades, so the current data doesn't reflect
a lot of mergers and splits, but that's a separate issue.)
As I come across these, I've been moving TIGER's name= value to the
operator= tag, since that seems more approprate. I've also been adding
the names of the rail lines when I can determine them. I mention this
both for context and to see if anyone has any comments on this particular
course of action.
Seems right for active lines. There are a lot of rail-philes (the actual
term escapes me) out there and I've seen some nice web pages with a lot of
good info. It would be nice to approach them to make their data available
for our use, or better yet, apply it themselves.
My question is about disused or abandoned railways. TIGER generally has
the last owner in the name= tag, which is as wrong as it is for active
railways. The operator= tag no longer seems appropriate, however, since
no one's really operating these railways any more. It would be nice to
preserve the name of the previous operator somewhere; are there any
conventions around this? (If I were creating tags out of whole cloth, I'd
probably use last_operator= or operator:last=.)
The actual name of a disused or abandoned railway seems a little iffy,
too. The names are mostly assigned by the operators and may be renamed or
reassigned periodically, so if a railway used to be called "X" by its
previous operator, there's an argument that once it's been abandoned it's
no longer named "X". Any thoughts on what could be done here?
old_name is documented for other objects. old_operator makes sense instead
of operator, too.
--
Alan Mintz <alan_mintz+...@earthlink.net>
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