[OSM-dev] Re: [OSM-talk] Broken Ways, WMS Server Status

Tom Carden tom at tom-carden.co.uk
Fri Apr 28 14:02:41 BST 2006


[moved to dev]

On 4/28/06, Immanuel Scholz <immanuel.scholz at gmx.de> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> >> Its "prevented" in terms of the problem with JOSM is fixed now. I don't
> >> see a reason to prevent this in the server, since something like this is
> >> usually silly and nobody will enter it anyway (except for a reason).
> >
> > My main concern is that it ruins the usability of OSM's data -- one
> > assumption that I was going to make was that ways are made up of unique
> > segments, but that's obviously not the case.
>
> Hm, I don't see the a real problem here. If you have an application that
> cannot live with ways having the same segment twice, then a conversion of
> the XML input is done very easily (my uniq-trick is not 100%, but gives a
> good start ;-).

I think you're being a little bit too liberal and tolerant with
regards to crap data.

What use is a way with repeated segments?  I can't think of a good use
of such a way, therefore we should reject it on the server and save
ourselves the headache of cleaning it up later.

It's not the same as a MediaWiki page full of junk or an article with
repeated paragraphs - it's more like a Category with duplicated
entries.  I don't know if MediaWiki rejects those, but it should.

Is there a decent definition of the current implementation of 'way',
and could it be improved?

Tom.




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