Hi all, As part of the Poland remapping effort I have implemented a reporting system called OSMonitor which analyzes road network in Poland in OSM data and produces reports. Recently one user requested additional validation - checking if ways in a relation for a specific road contain proper "ref" tag values (where "proper" means that "ref" on ways includes "ref" from the relation).
This is what came out of OSMonitor: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=OSMonitor/Poland_Major_Roads&oldid=791535 Note the error named "relation contains ways with wrong ref". So for some roads the ways contain multiple variants of "ref" value. More - "ref" tag for ways is out of sync with relation membership, see http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/172192711 (I am referring to the version 2 of this way in case it has been fixed in the meantime) for example. So the question is - why does "ref" on way level make sense at all when there is another (better and more flexible) way (pun intended) of doing things? Of course there is no hard rules in OSM concerning tagging but http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:ref does not say too much about the problem above. I think it should describe why relations should be used instead of "ref" tag on ways if possible. I understand that software that consumes OSM data (renderers, navigation) probably uses "ref" on ways but as you can see from the report - it is useless for most of the roads (in Poland, don't know about other countries) and relations contain more up-to-date information so the software should use relations in the first place. What do you think? Paweł _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
