On Mon, Dec 7, 2009 at 4:47 PM, Roy Wallace <waldo000...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 8, 2009 at 12:49 AM, Anthony <o...@inbox.org> wrote: > > > > Fortunately, you're not mapping for a router. If there's no verifiable > > data, you shouldn't map anything at all. I guess "unknown" would also be > > acceptable, though. > > I think this is an important point. It becomes a problem when people > try to map the *law*, because legal status is often difficult to > verify - e.g. you can't see it! > I think that's true in some situations, but that's not exactly what I was getting at. My response was to a situation where "the honest truth is that it's private land and the owner doesn't seem to care". The "private land" part is mostly likely verifiable, and can be tagged. "The owner doesn't seem to care", is, in my opinion, best expressed with the *lack* of a tag. Legal status often *is* verifiable. It's not always "mapping what's on the ground", but I think we've got a ways to go before we can get away with only mapping "what's on the ground". I agree it's a good ideal, but to follow it strictly, the routers would need a separate database to hold a list of jurisdiction-specific defaults. For example, just one example, here in Florida bicycles are allowed to use certain roadways (most roadways, in fact, but I'm too lazy to look up the exact law right this second). I'm not sure that's a universal law, applicable everyone in the world. But it's a law here in Florida, and there are no signs which say "bicycles allowed". Thus there's nothing "on the ground" to map. In theory we shouldn't map this. That means in Florida, we don't map "bicycles allowed", and in X-land (where bicycles aren't allowed by default, but there aren't any "bicycles prohibited" signs), we don't map "bicycles prohibited". However, that requires routers to know if they're in Florida or X-land (relatively simple, we have boundary relations for that), and to know what the default law is in Florida and X-land (that's the part we don't currently have). The alternative, is to use a completely different set of highway tags in Florida and X-land, which I suppose is one of the myriad of currently proposed solutions (mixed in with lots of other solutions, and lots of non-solutions as well).
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