How should we classify different types of aerodromes? We can already distinguish private aerodromes with the access tag "access=private" and military aerodromes with "military=airfield", and heliports have their own tag, but currently large international airports and tiny airstrips are not clearly distinguished.
I believe we can make a reasonable distinction between major classes of aerodromes: 1) Airstrips without buildings or any other developed features 2) Developed general aviation aerodromes which do not offer any regularly scheduled public, commercial passenger service 3) Commercial airports which offer regularly scheduled commercial passenger service History: In the very early years of OSM, there were three types of features where planes could land: aeroway=airport for airports, aeroway=airfield for undeveloped airstrips, and aeroway=aerodrome for general aviation sites, if I understand the history correctly. These were rendered differently back in 2008, it appears, based on the old discussion in the talk pages. However, at some point all of the aeroway=airport and aeroway=airfield features were edited (I don't know if it was done over a few months or all at once) to aeroway=aerodrome, which was defined to mean any place where aviation operations regularly take place, except for military airports, which are tagged miltary=airfield. Unfortunately, while this may work for pilots and aviation usage, it's not very sensible for general mappers. Some mappers have used aeroway=airstrip for small airfields without buildings or any other developed features, so that they will not be rendered. Others have proposed tags to specify the type of aerodrome. The oldest classification system used "type=*" but this conflicts with the key used for relations such as type=multipolygon. Another option was "aerodrome:type=" which has been used a couple of thousand times, but has not been clearly defined: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:aerodrome:type The most recent proposal in 2014 suggested using "aerodrome=*" which seems to fit best with the usual way of tagging the type or main classification of a feature. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Aerodrome I think this last option should be developed further, but we need to decide which values of "aerodrome=*" are viable. Mainly I'm interested in places with or without regular passenger service, since this is of greatest interest to most map users, but perhaps there could also be specific tags for cargo-only aerodromes and other specialized facilities. _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
