On Thu, Apr 25, 2024 at 10:13 AM Christoph Hormann <o...@imagico.de> wrote:
> [...] you can try to record semantically meaningful information about the > geographic reality. > > [...] Even more clear in that regard is the use of secondary tags like > snowmobile=yes, ice_road=yes, surface=ice. I don't think anyone objects to recording "semantically meaningful" information, and clearly those three tags suggested are rather low in their ambiguity. The main value of the highway tag (trunk, primary, and so forth) has no clear semantic meaning beyond their relative importance with respect to each other. There are a few exceptions to this, like in the UK and Ireland where they correspond exactly and perfectly to a government classification system. However, for most of the world the distinction between them is rather subjective and arbitrary. In some places, the =trunk tag in particular has been applied to roads meeting a certain physical characteristic, which I consider a harmful trend as it makes the tag much less useful for consumers trying to determine which zoom level to draw certain roads at. "The most important roads in Antarctica are trunk" is no more or less correct than "all roads in Antarctica are track" (in order to draw out the most extreme positions). Antarctica is not the only outlier, we have similar debates for roads in Alaska for similar reasons, and I suspect other similarly sparse areas of the globe have similar challenges. All this to say, I'm not sure we should be sweating which tag to use on these roads all that much.
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