Author: tom[at]tom-carden.co.uk
[Added to the original trac issue at 6.11pm, Wednesday, 30th November 2005]

I don't think they should be called Tracks as described on the wiki:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/wiki/index.php/XML_Schema

Better that they be called Streets or Ways or something which doesn't confuse them with GPS/GPX tracks/traces/trk elements.

Some thought should be put into whether segments automatically inherit properties of the streets they are in, whether a segment can be in more than one street, etc.

My vote would be that streets don't have tags, but that clients offer to apply tags to all elements contained in a particular street. Street properties can be inferred from the properties of their tags.

Similar notes added here: http://www.openstreetmap.org/wiki/index.php/Talk:XML_Schema

Author: immanuel.scholz[at]gmx.de
[Added to the original trac issue at 2.15pm, Wednesday, 15th February 2006]

Let's call them ways. Since people start creating slopes, the name "street" does not really fit! "track" is reserved for GPS tracks, I agree.

But please, let ways have properties! This is an important distingtion to have several different ways over the same segments. As example a way that define a bus route can have completly different properties than several of the ways that define the streets of this bus route, which in turn have different attributes from the a-road spanning the whole stuff.

It would be a really mess, if you try to fiddle that into segment's properties only!