Hi all,
the suggestions from Raphael and Yves, to just tag the highways with something and omit the route relations entirely seems like an clean approach here, if you primarily want to be able to know which ways are part of the hiking network (e.g. to color them), and the actual routes themselves are less of interest (as I think is the case).
However, it does seem that by omitting the routes, you are making things more fragile and are omitting some valuable information, though I find it hard to translate that intuition into actual examples.
One advantage of adding route relations, I think, is that it allows more powerful automated checking of the network, to detect cases where a route was accidentally deleted, a way was removed from a route, etc. One example of such checking (which I forgot to point out in my earlier post), is done by knooppuntnet.nl, see https://knooppuntnet.nl/en/analysis/ for some examples. I think support for named nodes is still in progress, though.
Of course there is a potential fallacy here: If adding routes enables automated checking, but that checking only exposes problems that would not exist in a tagging scheme without the routes, then the "allows-analysis" argument by itself is moot. However, I suspect there are still some problems that can be detected more easily/reliably with relations (e.g. distinguishing a dead-end route to a viewpoint from a broken route).
Also, Sarah makes a good point about consistency toward data consumers, which expect route relations currently.
On Sat, Sep 04, 2021 at 09:28:45AM +0100, Sarah Hoffmann wrote:
Long story short: mapping the waymarkings on ways is another dimension here and I'm not sure it is a good idea to bring it into the discussion right now. The same is true for the node network mapping schema.
I'm not sure I agree with the latter entirely. Your argument about using route relations for consistency towards data consumer seems to apply to using the node network mapping schema as well. That is a documented (though still in-progress) schema for networks such as these, so supporting it (maybe with some changes to the schema, maybe making some things optional, like tagged junction nodes) would make it easier for data consumers to consistently use the data. One could argue that this should be a separate discussion, but I'm not sure if there's much point in settling on a schema for Switzerland first, and then afterwards starting to think about the node networks separately.
In any case, like I mentioned above, having automated analysis tools like knooppuntnet.nl support the Swiss network would, IMHO, be quite useful. Whether that means adapting the Swiss tagging scheme, or adapting knooppuntnet.nl (and/or the documented node network tagging scheme) is to be determined, IMHO.
Gr.
Matthijs