I'm getting confused by this. When I read one part of the OSM wiki I see it talking about classifying highways purely by their physical characteristics (which after some thought makes vague sense, since you could in theory product and alternative map based on road 'importance' by using REF tags), however these pages appear to be in the minority. (we'll call this the 'physical' definiton)
The majority of pages talk about classifying roads by their state funding designation and or highway reference which is fine because these are pretty easy to explicitly define. (And this definition seems to work pretty well in rural areas where all roads are close to the same quality). (We'll call this the 'reference' definition) Unfortunately there's another set of definitions specifically for Urban areas (a definition which itself is very vague since the boundaries of said areas are completely subjective) which suggest defining roads by their important in the city's network (such as whether they are cross city or link roads or whatever). This is unfortunately a highly subjective definition depending on where one lives in a city and therefore what one considers the main traffic routes from their perspective (I know this since I've lived in 1/2 a dozen places around my city and my perception of what were main roads has changed over that time to centre on my current location). (We'll call this the 'importance' definition) Now poking around the various Capital Cities of Australia looking for inspiration in the work of others I see: * Tasmania appears to be using close to the 'reference' definition * Perth also appears to be doing something similar (using SR's < 10 and SR's ending in 0 as the trunk list) * Brisbane appears to be using a 'physical' definition * Melbourne talks in it's wiki website about following something close to a 'reference' definition but upon examination looks like an 'importance' definition. * Canberra uses something akin to a 'physical' definition * Sydney looks to be using a 'reference' definition * Darwin doesn't have enough roads to really appreciate this concept but appears to be using a 'reference' definition. Which brings me to Adelaide, my home City, which can only be described as a 'pigs breakfast' at the moment, following none of these particular models very well at all. I've attempted in the last couple of weeks to follow the 'reference' model and start organising things but it would appear that others don't agree with model. So after all that waffling on, my question is: What is the 'correct' OSM model to follow? Are we mapping for navigational purposes purely (and therefore a reference or improtance model) or to describe the world (and therefore a physical model)? And whichever of those models we follow I have questions about the definitions also (but I'd like to sort out the model we should be working towards first). -- =b _______________________________________________ Talk-au mailing list Talk-au@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk-au
