[OSM-dev] How to tag addresses

[Andy Robinson]

Shaun McDonald wrote:
>Sent: 14 June 2007 1:40 AM
>To: Dave Hansen
>Cc: osm-dev
>Subject: Re: [OSM-dev] How to tag addresses
>
>
>On 14 Jun 2007, at 01:18, Dave Hansen wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 2007-06-13 at 17:14 -0700, Brandon Martin-Anderson wrote:
>>>
>>> I didn't realize you could tag segments. Sometimes segment address
>>> ranges would have to be interpolated but this is doable.
>>
>> It's technically feasible, but discouraged.  Anybody want to fill
>> us in
>> on the history behind this one?
>>
>
> From what I can tell segments don't get tagged any more, instead you
>have multiple ways on the same segments. Tagged segments show up in
>the maplint layer.
>
>Having a duplicate way here would be just a waste of time, so I think
>we should break the mould and allow the tagging of segments just for
>address ranges.
>
>(I've not been here long enough to know the history of the issue,
>though I imagine that it will be in the mailing list and/or the wiki.)

Indeed, OSM started without ways and therefore we were tagging segments &
nodes alone 18 months ago. Once ways were enabled we wanted to discourage
the tagging of segments because that was leading to nobody creating ways.
Now that the rendering essentially only displays ways that specific concern
has gone away. However there has been on and off discussion over the last
year for dropping segments entirely and that's still a distinct possibility,
therefore tagging segments may not be a reliable method in the longer term.
Having said that if there was a lot of data on segments that might stop the
temptation to drop them.

We don't currently have an ideal method of tagging objects with address
data, and that's something I'll be expanding upon in my SOTM talk.

Cheers

Andy

Andy Robinson
Andy_J_Robinson at blueyonder.co.uk