Jens Glad Balchen via Tagging <tagging@openstreetmap.org> writes: > I don't know how this works in other countries. The way it works here > is that the road owner contracts someone to do stuff, that is, to > actually go out and put down asphalt, cut vegetation, sweep debris, > clear snow, fix signage, etc. The road owner can split these contracts > between different contractors. To ensure some level of continuity and > consistency, the road owner is still the single point of contact for > the public. The public doesn't know and doesn't care who the > contractors are.
Sure, that happens here. By "maintainer" I mean the entity responsible for maintenance and how the people driving the trucks and wielding the shovels get paid is a detail that doesn't matter for this discussion. But, if one entity owns a road, and another entity is responsible in a large-scale sense for maintenance, that's different. I mean an example like entity A is a homeowner's association and owns the road entity B is the Town Public Works and does maintenance (because even though the road is private all the people that live on it pay taxes too). So people call B to say "this road didn't get plowed in the snowstorm that just finished". > So in this sense, you could say if the county owns a road, the county > is in principle both the owner and the operator, and as the operator > the county has contracted operational tasks to someone else. In this > case we can safely assume that the owner and operator are the same > entity. This wasn't historically true in Norway -- there was a > ten-year period during which the counties owned the roads, but the > state's road authority was the operator of those roads. This was in > contrast to municipal roads, where the municipality was always both > owner and operator. It's just like that in MA: there are roads that are "town roads" in most sense, but the state highway department is the operator. That's the designation "state highway". So really owner is not the same thing as operator. You just can't assume that. > If we look at this from a data perspective, the most important > information for us to capture /today/ is which public entity type owns > the road and put this in the ownership tag. The specific entity can be > derived geographically with probably 100% accuracy. If we have the > specific entity available in a data set, we can put this in the owner > tag. If the operator at some point in the future again diverges from > the owner (like with the county roads), we can put that in operator. You need to define schema for the code points in "ownership". They are far from obvious. You are defining a rule that one can use "ownership" and admin boundaries to find a value for "owner". That's ok, but it needs to be clearly documented. It's easy for a human to stick something in and think they have communicated, but it's much harder for a data consumer to get it right. You are defining a rule that "operator" should, if missing, be presumed to be the same entity as "owner". That's ok, but it needs to be very clear. Basically I am asking you to think through the situation more broadly, for realities not matching yours and data consumers other than the ones you are contemplating, and I feel this is too much of a hack for a point problem. Maybe you meant all of what I am asking, but it seems very much too implicit. _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
