Tag usage: Most typical mistakes?

Hello,

I am just testing how an ontology could be used for OpenStreetMap data. Since it is possible to detect inconsistent used tags, I wanted to ask you if you could help me to find good examples.

I could of course “detect” that the combination of “building=house” and “highway=motorway” is not a good idea, but I was wondering if there are more “typical mistakes” you might know of?

Thanks for the help!

One that annoys me but might be programmatically difficult to detect: Someone who tags a maxspeed=* on a single node beside a highway=* way without tagging the maxspeed=* on the way itself. I’m guessing that they figure that somehow routing software that is only looking at ways can see, like a human driver, the side of the road to get the speed limit.

The other one is where someone went to the effort to collect street numbers but when tagging the buildings/nodes did not also tag the street name. Especially on corner locations it takes a human to determine which road the address is supposed to be on. However there is already a tool that shows that problem at http://tools.geofabrik.de/osmi/?view=addresses&overlays=buildings,buildings_with_addresses,postal_code,no_addr_street,street_not_found,nodes_with_addresses_defined,nodes_with_addresses_interpolated,interpolation,interpolation_errors,connection_lines,nearest_points,nearest_roads

Awhile ago there was a posting on the talk mailing list about a plugin for JOSM. I only used it for a short period, but it also notifies you of tag combinations that are seldom used.

the links

[1]https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/JOSM/Plugins/OSMantic
[2] http://k1z.blog.uni-heidelberg.de/2013/11/19/call-for-chapter-proposal-submission-on-openstreetmap-in-giscience-experiences-research-applications/

Thanks for the responses!

I am not a highway tagging expert, but as far as I understand, you should never use “maxspeed” on a node - is that correct? You should only use it when you use a way (-> like a street/highway). If that is the case, I think it isn’t too difficult to implement it, but currently, I am more focusing on tag combinations, not too much on the geometries.

This is something my ontology already “solves” :slight_smile:

Thanks Escada for the links. I will have a look at it.

Of course, you know the QA tool osmose which is also reporting some tagging classical errors:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Osmose/
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Osmose/errors