Open Railway Map (ORM) is a great resource that recently came on the scene to allow for fast identification and tracing of railway lines, rights of way and even individual tracks. Unfortunately as project that is based in Continental Europe, its coverage of North America (and the British Isles) has some serious shortcomings, especially when it comes to signaling and train protection systems. The information is incomplete and the presentation is seriously lacking. Ironically we have already seen a better way to present this sort of information in multiple railroad-produced employee timetables.
In Europe almost all railway lines are considered signaled, with the specific method of block working, (ie manual, automatic, token, bi-directional, etc) not being as important as it is in North America. As a result the signaling layer mostly documents special train protection systems like ETCS, TVM420, LZB, etc. (Even then a lot of "National" ATS-like systems like AWS and Le Crocodile do not make an appearance, although PZB does.)
When translated to North America the result is a generic tag for "PTC" and another for "ATC", even though neither labels refer to specific train protection systems as is the case on the European overlays. One might say the project got a little in over its head trying to color code every protection system, although they do have 40 color codes for speeds. The maps cannot seem to handle situations where multiple gauges, electrification systems or train protection systems are present on the same track segment.
The solution, at least for the North American segment, is to first dump the generic "PTC" and replace it with ETMS and ACSES. Next, drop ATC and replace that with Cab Signal System (CSS) and then add in "ETMS with CSS" where applicable. Since ACSES generally needs CSS there is no reason to restate the presence of CSS in that case. For a stretch goal I would add tags for CTC and ABS, however in a global context indicating bi-directionality is less important, so maybe a single TCB tag for "track circuit block" can be used where ETMS is not present. In the (currently) few cases where ETMS s present without TCB, and "ETMS with TWC" tag could be used.
In an ideal world ORM could "stripe" colors where multiple tags apply in a similar fashion to the Union Pacific employee timetables which at one point were managing CTC, ABS, TWC, ATS, ATC and CSS systems, but that would probably require significant development time.
If ORM had some clear way to make contributions I'd be down to make the more basic changes myself wiki-style, but I can't see exactly how to do that and e-mails are going unanswered. Leave a message in the comments if you know what I'm missing.
