On 17 March 2013 09:54, sk53.osm <sk53....@gmail.com> wrote: > I've noticed that many minor roads in the Highland Region of Scotland have > been tagged with ref=[CU]#### based on a PDF document from the regions > transport department. I've altered a few of these where I've encountered > them to official:ref=* as I don't believe that these are verifiable on the > ground in any way. > > I'd be interested in what others think (these council based refs do appear > elsewhere in the country: I can't recall ever seeing one on a road sign).
I don't think whether or not the reference numbers appear on signs is relevant at all. If the road has an official reference number "C616" (and it can be verified it in some way) then I don't why that shouldn't be tagged using the key that's designed for primary official reference numbers, i.e. ref=C616. I would say that altering our tagging to avoid these numbers appearing on maps or in directions is to a large extent tagging for the render / router. The reference number *is* C616. Whether or not a map or router chooses to use that is something for the map or router to decide. Yes it will be hard to make these decisions at times, and maybe the OSM data should contain hints, but I'm not sure altering how we store the reference number is the best way to help. I would imagine that there are also going to be lots of cases of rural road with names where the name is well known to locals (and the postman) but is never actually signed anywhere. (Typically the road leaving one village and heading for the next will be named after the village it is heading to, but there may not be any signs to that effect.) Should we also not put this name in the name tag, because it isn't signed with that name on the ground, and routers using the name will confuse their users? I don't think there's any getting away from having good routers / navigation software adopting country-specific rules for how to describe different classes of road to users. For any cases where we may need to deviate from these country-defaults, perhaps we need a tag that describes what the road is or is not signed as on the ground. (If you really want to do navigation well, you would need to know what each road is signed as at each junction. On UK road signs outside residential areas, it's usually the major destination that's signed at junctions with a road number for A and B roads, rather than a name. So simply removing C and U reference numbers won't actually help that much. Users of navigation software would then either get an equally confusing name or nothing, rather than what is actually written on the sign at the junction.) Robert. -- Robert Whittaker _______________________________________________ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb