[OSM-dev] API 0.5 is on the way
Brett Henderson
brett at bretth.com
Tue Sep 11 23:41:50 BST 2007
Frederik Ramm wrote:
> Hi,
>
> (posting to talk & dev with reply-to set to dev, dunno if that works)
>
> those of you who also follow the "dev" list have seen that Gabriel
> Ebner has recently presented a working prototype of "OSM without
> segments", and I have created "OSM with relationships".
>
> We have combined those two into a shiny new "OSM 0.5" which we hope to
> deploy in early October, provided that we don't encounter major obstacles
> and provided of course we have the support of the community and those
> who manage our essential servers (and take the blame if something
> breaks...).
>
> The changeover from 0.4 to 0.5 will do away with segments, and at once
> remove all complexity associated with them - "unordered ways", "unwayed
> segments", and so on. The planet file will shrink by 40%, and API
> performance, especially on bounding box downloads, will be greatly
> improved as we're removing one level of indirection. Relationships
> will be rather unimportant in the beginning but their existence allows
> a great deal more tagging flexibility (turn restrictions, superways,
> all that stuff).
>
Excellent work on all of this. I had resigned myself to the fact that
segments would be around forever. I won't miss them :-)
As for relationships, I think they're an exciting idea. They certainly
appear to have the possibility to solve many of our current modelling
problems. I'm sure standards will take a while to standardise around
their usage resulting in some heated mailing list discussions, but that
is a good thing :-)
> Nodes and their history remain unchanged, but the history information
> linked to segments and ways will be removed in the process. This is
> unavoidable since the new model is structurally different from the old
> model, and many historic ways simply cannot be represented in the new
> model.
>
I have to ask the question. Is there any point maintaining history for
nodes when way history has been lost? Would it be better to make a
clean break, and leave a read-only 0.4 api exposing history data and
start from scratch.
I must admit that my reasons for asking this are selfish. I'd love
history tables to accurately reflect current data ...
Cheers,
Brett
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