Australian Tagging Guidelines

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Convert a Tracklog to Data Automatically

City, Town and Village

There is no consistent approach yet for this. It was discussed on the mailing list in December 2008.

Australia has many places that are important centres for large areas, but have very few residents. These should be labeled towns because it is how they are considered, even though closer to major population centres they would be considered villages. Until (or unless) we reach agreement on firmer guidelines, you should choose locality tags (place=*) based on popular perception rather than administrative designation or population.

Due to OSM being very euro-centric in thinking, to make villages and towns visible at higher zoom levels you may need to mark them as place=city, this is to force them to be rendered and has nothing to do with them being towns or cities. Perhaps it is just a Eurocentric idea that you shouldn't have blank spaces on a map, and changing the designation of a village to a city is really the dreaded "tagging for the renderer".

Show town areas on maps

For small towns in rural and remote areas it's nice to have a grey blob show the approx. area the town covers, you can do this by drawing a closed way around the town, using the WMS plugin in JOSM makes this pretty straight forward. You then apply the tags landuse=residential, even if they have other land uses. Alternatively if the town is large enough you can mark the various landuse tags and the area will render showing the different areas in different colours.

Australian Road Tagging

August 2009 note

There is substantial current discussion on mailing lists on what is an unclassified road and how to mark walking and cycling paths. There may be alterations to the scheme below. If you would like to comment, please join the mailing list and discuss there.

Here are some recommendations for tagging of Australian Roads. Please join the mailing list for discussion and comments.

NOTE: For help in tagging roads in New South Wales under the MABC Alphanumeric Route Numbering Scheme, see this webpage with photos of signs spotted with Alphanumeric route numbers. http://ozroads.com.au/NSW/Special/MAB/evidence.htm.


Regional Roads

Use the surface=unpaved tag to indicate where roads are not sealed.

Use the ref tag to indicate a route number that is signposted according to the standard below. Omit non-signposted, anachronistic or historical route numbers.

Urban Areas

Use the ref tag to indicate a route number that is signposted according to the standard below. Omit non-signposted, anachronistic or historical routes.

surface=paved

For most types of highway=* tags you don't need to specify the surface=paved key/value pair as this is assumed, when was the last time you saw a motorway or major highway in most places unpaved?

lanes=*

If a way has 2 lanes you don't need to tag this, as it's assumed, you only need to use lanes=* tag if there is less than 2 lanes or more than 2 lanes.

The only exception is when there is a oneway=yes, then the number of lanes is assumed to be 1, use lanes=2 for any one way street that have more than 1 lane.

tunnel=yes and bridge=yes

A tunnel isn't assumed to be layer=-1 and a bridge isn't assumed to be layer=1 you must tag bridges and tunnels with layer tags too!

layer=0

You don't need to tag things layer=0, this is assumed to be anything ground level including rivers and streams, bridges go over rivers and need to be tagged layer=1, I can't think of a single situation where tagging a bridge layer=-1 would be valid, yet people have tagged various parts of the Bruce Highway all sorts of funny things!

Mark a Track as "Dry Weather Only"

There isn't a tag for this yet, with two possibilities on the proposed features lists

dry_weather_only=yes

access=dry_weather/all_weather which is intended for roads open or closed by season

4WD only track

Mark these highway=track; surface=unpaved

The most popular tag in Australia to indicate that a road is 4wd only is

4wd_only=yes

(used over 1000 times as at 2011)

This tag is used, but not extensively, outside Australia.

Where 4wd_only=no is used it indicates explicitly that a road is suitable for a standard car.

4wd_only=recommended is used for roads that cars might be able to travel on, but really shouldn't.

Consider also using Key:smoothness.

Roundabouts

All roundabouts, big or small, should be drawn out in full. Make the way go clockwise, and the correct direction of movement is then shown on the map. Mark it junction=roundabout

Please read the following page as well. Tag:junction=roundabout

Note: each entry and exit way should join the roundabout at a separate node.
Note: you do not need to add oneway=yes tag, as this is implied by the junction=roundabout tag.


This is not a mini_roundabout draw it out in full: [1]

These are not roundabouts:

This is tagged highway=turning_circle: [2]

This should be tagged traffic_calming=island [3]

Naming Streets

Route Numbers

There has been no standard for route numbering across Australia. One of our members is working on rendering route numbers with the correct visual look. To allow this to happen we need to use a consistent route tagging scheme across Australia. All states either use the old 'shield' system, or the new Alphanumeric system. Some (NSW and Queensland) are in the process of changing from one to the other.

Tagging highway ref=* and name=*

The current thinking is to not tag individual ways with ref or name tags, especially where multiple highways share the same physical section of road, instead in most cases it's best to create a separate relation for each rel=* and name=* and then add all the applicable ways to the respective relation rather than trying to cram lots of information into the same key pairs.

For example the majority of the A1 in QLD is the Bruce Highway, however the A1 continues after the Bruce Highway ends in Cairns and becomes the Captain Cook Highway, in this case there will be 3 relations, a relation for the A1, a relation for the Bruce Highway and a relation for the Captain Cook Highway. The only exception for naming ways is if the way has a local street name, in Cairns the Bruce Highway is also called Mulgrave Road.

The A1 relation should be tagged as follows:

ref=A1
route=road
type=route

The Bruce Highway relation should be tagged as follows:

name=Bruce Highway
route=road
type=route

The Captain Cook Highway relation should be tagged as follows:

name=Captain Cook Highway
route=road
type=route

Minor Highways

Minor highways generally keep the same ref=* and name=* for the entire length of the highway so there is no point making 2 relations in this case.

Minor Roads

Depending on the road it's generally best to keep tagging ways rather than making relations, although there is nothing wrong with making a relation if you think the road is big enough.

Highway Refs

Use the following tags. The style of the signage will give you clues as to which is the correct tag

Non-Alphanumeric Highway Shields

network=NR,ref=* National Route - (black on white shield)
network=alt_NR,ref=* National Route - (black on white shield, 'ALT' at the top of the shield)
network=NH,ref=* National Highway - (yellow on green shield)
network=MR,ref=* Metroad - (blue on white hexagon)
network=DR,ref=* Detour roads marked as D roads in NSW and DR in QLD
network=S,ref=* State Route - (white on blue shield)
network=T,ref=* Tourist Route - (white on brown Pentagon)

Alphanumeric Highway Shields

ref=M* Motorways(yellow on green rectangle)
ref=A* A Roads (yellow on green rectangle)
network=alt,ref=A* Alt A Roads (yellow on green rectangle, with the word ALT at the top of the shield)
ref=B* B Roads (yellow on green rectangle)
ref=C* C Roads (yellow on green rectangle)
ref=D* D Roads (if they exist, yellow on green rectangle)

Examples

In the case of the M, A, B & C roads, the M7 would be ref=M7

Pay close attention to the name of the road and the routing reference. For example the M5 motorway in Sydney is called M5 Motorway and its reference is network=MR, ref=5. This will change with alphanumeric references, but for now the only road with a motorway reference in Sydney is the ref=M7. This is different in Melbourne and other states.

NSW Alphanumeric references

Alphanumeric numbering in NSW has been installed on most NSW road signs, but is usually covered by blank plates, or with plates the have the metroad or highway number. Some roads such as the Hume Highway near Albury, and the M7 in Sydney have fully adopted the alphanumeric references, and these should be used. However, if you notice a single sign where the coverplate is missing (like on the Southern Freeway (NR1) freeway entrance at Helensburgh, then by all means make a note on the way of the reference as alt_ref, but don't update the main road ref until it is clear the change is made on the ground. OSM will be quick to update road references when the transition to alphanumeric references is official, but jumping the gun ahead of the official change may confuse people navigating with our maps.

Rural Road Numbering

Geographic Information – Rural Addressing is published as Australian/New Zealand Standard, AS/NZS 4724:2000.

A full description of this standard can be located in this pdf document, published by Land Victoria.

Where possible, a relation should be created for rural roads indicating the start node, any ways applicable and an end node so that this information can be used for routing without needing to individually survey each possible street address. This information won't be useful for rendering.

The relation should be tagged as: 

type=numbering
numbering=as/nzs_4724:2000

The role of ways should be listed as member, and the nodes as start/end respectively.

Urban Footpaths and Cycleways

Note: The guidelines in this section relate to footpaths and cycleways (usually paved) in urban areas. For bush and other non-urban ways see Bush Walking and Cycling Tracks.

Regional and Local Route tagging

Just with highways and motorways these routes need to have their own relation connecting the ways in the route.

OSM provides three "networks": local (lcn), regional (rcn), national (ncn), based on the UK model. Although Australia doesn't have exactly the same model, we can treat short, council bike paths as LCN and longer paths that cross council boundaries as RCN. There is currently no strict distinction between LCN and RCN for Australia, individual cases can be debated on the talk-au list. We don't currently use NCN - this could be discussed.

LCN

These paths are frequently short (less than 10km), signed on-road with signs to destinations rather than the name of a trail, and might be a network rather than a single trail. For example, see the unnamed trails in this map: [8]

Please note the use of suburb here is for gazetted suburbs which exist in nearly all parts of the country, at present there is no tag for council and no council boundaries in the system.

RCN

Other, longer, more prominent, better known trails, generally no shorter than perhaps 5km, and as long as 200km. This includes rail trails, trails named after creeks, trails named after freeways etc. These are almost all shared-use trails.

Bus Routes and Stops

Bus routes also need their own relations per route, and stops along the way need to be added to the relation as well

TODO: add an example.

Footpath Cycling

Note that cycling is legal on all footpaths in the ACT and Queensland (unless marked otherwise), but it is specifically not allowed in at least NSW, SA and Victoria -- cycling in these states is allowed only on normal roads and dedicated cyclepaths, with a concession permitting children under 12 and adults riding with those children to ride on footpaths.

Bush Walking and Cycling Tracks

Notes:

  1. The guidelines in this section relate to footpaths and cycleways (usually unpaved) in bush and other non-urban areas. For footpaths and cycleways in urban areas see Urban Footpaths and Cycleways.
  2. Do not use highway=footway.
  3. Because of the highly variable state of bush tracks and abilities of users, tag on the basis of their physical condition (width, surface etc) and legal (usually signposted) restrictions, rather than assigning a subjective assessment of whether not they are, for example, suitable for bicycles.

Rail Trails

(See WikiProject Victoria, Australia/Bike paths)

Note, the trail may diverge from the old railway route at places. Use discretion here. :)

Also use an RCN relation as described above.

Tramways

Use railway=tram for trams in the following ways:

Administrative Boundaries

Hiding admin boundaries in JOSM

Since about r3200 JOSM has supported an object filtering method to make objects non-selectable, or hide them entirely. This comes in very handy in Australia with all the admin boundaries that have been imported into OSM from the ABS. While these boundaries contain some very useful information, it can be a big headache if you are trying to map in roads and railway lines so this is how you can make them vanish.

Firstly bring up the filtering panel, either by clicking on the filter icon on the left hand side of the screen, or by hitting Alt+Shift+F. You should now see the filter panel appearing on the right hand side of the screen, most likely on the bottom.

Simply click the add button and type in 'boundary=administrative' and click 'Submit Filter'.

This will disable any admin boundary objects so you can no longer select or modify them, if you want to hide them completely simply tick the check box under the 'H' column (H for hide).

Unfortunately for various reasons admin boundaries have been used in the past as the basis for roads, railways, rivers etc, especially where it was difficult or impossible to get to and where the aerial imagery was lacking. So it might not be as simple as hiding all admin boundaries, but only hiding the ones that aren't used for any other purpose, to achieve this the filter string is a little bit more complex, and instead you would use this 'boundary=administrative -(highway=* | waterway=* | natural=* | railway=*) type:way'.

How to de-merge admin boundaries

Ultimately it's hoped to de-merge all of the admin boundaries in OSM, at least in Australia, and it makes editing things much more difficult when the boundaries and any objects they are mixed in with diverge. Also when admin boundaries are split to make other features the relations enclosing them aren't always properly updated by software being used to edit and this can cause lots of other problems with meta information that isn't easily noticed, especially by people unfamiliar with OSM and it's tool stack.

To do this you can use a pair of object filters in JOSM to only show admin boundaries that are mixed with other ways like highways and railways:

filter 1: waterway=* | natural=coastline | natural=land
filter 2: boundary=administrative -(highway=* | railway=*) type:way

You need filters in that order, I also selected the hide option so all the irrelevant boundaries just don't show.

Next you can use the XAPI interface to download all the admin boundaries within a given bounding box by opening a location from within JOSM:

http://xapi.openstreetmap.org/api/0.6/way%5Bboundary=administrative%5D%5Bbbox=151.72119139999998,-28.4638623,153.62731929999998,-26.6670958%5D

The bbox above is for south east queensland and will download about 33M of OSM data as a result, but the same thing could be used for anywhere.

With the filtering in place there should be only a few admin boundaries still being displayed, all you need to do then is copy and paste or duplicate the ways, slightly offset the boundaries and you're done. If the ways are directly copied from ABS information please leave the source and attribution tags in places on the highways and railways etc.

The XAPI interface is delayed by 5 minutes or so behind the main API server, so it can be worth selecting any/all ways and update them from the main API before editing.

(National, State etc) Parks

These include National Parks, State Parks, Reserves etc etc that are administered by government authorities. Refer to the defintions below.

There are multiple standards used for mapping such areas including "landuse=forest" (refers to managed forest ie planted by humans) or "natural=wood" (natural forest). These both refer to land use, rather than defining the boundary of a park.

Park boundaries are really administrative boundaries, much like Local Government Areas etc. The current standards allow for "boundary=national_park" however this is too prescriptive ie only implies National Parks. There is a requirement to accommodate a hierarchy of parks from National Parks through to reserves managed by councils. In addition, the "boundary=" tag should always be used with the "admin_level=" tag to specify at what (zoom) level the boundaries should be displayed. Below is a proposed set of values and levels for each type of park.

Will insert table here with park hierarchy and levels Craigfeuerherdt 05:14, 6 January 2010 (UTC)

Definitions

Guidelines for land use mapping in Australia: principles, procedures and definitions, Edition 3, Commonwealth of Australia, 2006 have defined land use as "the purpose to which the land cover is committed. Some land uses, such as agriculture, have a characteristic land cover pattern. These usually appear in land cover classifications. Other land uses, such as nature conservation, are not readily discriminated by a characteristic land cover pattern. For example, where the land cover is woodland, land use may be timber production or nature conservation."

To put things in context, their other definitions are;

What-do-I-call-it?

Do put things on the map which are relevant and have no suitable tags. Identify the nodes with some_new_tag and they can be edited later as needed.

How can I tag streets with missing signs/no names?

Current system used by a few mappers in Australia is to use the following tag combinations:

The use of a date is to indicate when things were last checked. Alternatively you can phone, write or email the council responsible for an area to try and find out street names from an authoritative source.

While it is rare, but if the street really doesn't have a name you could tag things this way:

What happens if another map says a road exists but isn't really there?

These roads are often called untrafficable by mapping companies they are also known as trap streets, that's because people who blatantly copy the map won't know those streets don't exist so they will get trapped and it will be easy to prove the map was copied. You should never ever copy data from other maps into OSM's database, this may cause OSM to be accused of copyright infringement and face possible lawsuits. You should upload GPX files/GPS traces to prove how you came to map the data.

In the case of roads that don't exist they generally fall into one of three categories, gazetted but never built, was a track or stock route but the land has been bought/taken over by a land holder or they are simply fake roads that mapping companies put in to trap people.

It seems from various sources most, if not all, of the non-existent roads in Australia are from the first two categories, and mapping companies don't seem to need to invent fake streets.

Note that in cases where the road previously existed but has been removed, there may be GPS traces for the old road. It may pay to double check in this case.

So how do I let others know there is no street?

This is a difficult question to answer, in general if something appears on another map but looks blank on OSM you can assume that area simply hasn't been mapped. However this isn't always the case, so to save yourself from trying to map a non-existent street a second or third time the following seems to be the best advice available as of Aug 2009.

What you must never do!

Never copy the road into the OSM database from a source we don't have permission to copy from, even though you made an observation that it doesn't exist you can only map what you saw or what your surveyed otherwise this may still open OSM up to possible legal action.

What about using meta information from the DCDB Queensland data?

It's suggested that roads which are planned but have not yet been built could be tagged: 

highway=nonexistent

In most states the evidence for planned roads is formally published in the respective Government Gazette. If the road was never built, if there is sufficient demand it could be built in future without needing to acquire land as the land ownership was retained by the respective government body.

Other planned roads occur in new residential subdivisions. These are normally planned and built by the developer to council specifications on what is initaly private land, then taken over by the local council.

Using Imported Data

Imported data may not be accurate, it's entirely dependent on what the data was originally intended for, the ABS didn't need highly accurate data to do geographical based statistics, however the Qld government has release property boundary data which is acurate as it is the source to settle legal disputes between land owners.

ABS boundary data is generally reasonably accurate and it isn't up to date, boundaries that follow where roads went after roads have been re-aligned, the same is true of railways that have been shifted.

Use common sense when utilising imported sources to map roads from, surveyed data from GPS handsets may be more accurate if possible check sat imagery to confirm. Although sat imagery isn't aligned properly all the time either.

ABS boundary data is particularly useful for finding rivers and roads to map them in less populated areas, where it is more accurate that the Landsat images and no one has surveyed the roads/rivers with a GPS receiver.

Cultural Features

Australia has some unique ways of doing things so we need some different tags.

Licensed Club

amenity=licensed_club A licensed club is a community based club which has meeting rooms and a liquor licence. Most have additional services eg bistro / restaurant, poker machines.

Sports Grounds

If you don't know the name of the local Bowls Club mark the grounds as leisure=pitch and sport=bowls. Easy to add a name later, or if you don't think you'll be back to fix it put a FIXME=name tag.

(added by Liz. Stevage isn't so sure. For starters, there User:Stevage/tagsupport isn't a single renderer that would mark it as such. "leisure=pitch, sport=bowls, name=Bowls Club, FIXME=name" looks better.)

Cellar Door

Even though the term "Cellar Door" is widely used, promoted and understood to be a wine tourist attraction, it seems it was too confusing to most Americans to think a cellar door was used for anything but tornado sheltering, at this stage you are best to tag these locations as:

tourism=attraction
shop=wine

Assuming that you aren't trying to tag a winery that offers tours of their facility, then it would be best to tag:

tourism=winery
shop=wine

External Links

Australian Highway information on Wikipedia

Expressway - The Australian Highway Site

Ozroads: The Australian Roads Website

Licensed clubs in Australia

Retrieved from "http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Australian_Tagging_Guidelines"
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