[OSM-dev] Stud. project (XML): automated tagging & rendering of motorway junctions

[Freek]

Hi,
We (five CS students) are considering to do a small project for a course on 
(XML) databases around OSM data (approx. 15-20 effective hours/person). As a 
secondary goal, we'd like to be able to contribute something useful to OSM.

The idea we have in mind at the moment is the following. As relations form a 
relatively new addition to OSM, we think it would be nice to add support to 
Osmarender for e.g. rendering motorway junction names at location hints [1].
Because these relations are not yet widely used, we also want to develop a 
tool for automatically identifying the parts of a junction and create (/ 
propose for human verification) relations representing complete junctions, 
including location hints.

Especially in the Netherlands, all motorway junctions are present in the data 
set, but not in a useful form for rendering (often not even tagged with 
highway=motorway_junction). The (preliminary) aim of this project would then 
be to be able to render all junction names in the Netherlands nicely (later 
on, junctions in other countries will probably not be difficult to finish). 
This would then form a sort of case-study of the usefulness of relations for 
location hints in OSM and automating the process of adding them.

Because of the project setting, we will use as much X{Query,Path,SLT} as 
possible :-)

What do you think about the idea:
- Is it realizable?
- Is it useful?
- Do you have a (probably completely different) suggestion within the scope of 
the project [2]?

[1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Relations/Proposed/Junctions
[2] http://www.win.tue.nl/~tcalders/teaching/advancedDB/project.pdf

P.S. if we don't get comments, we'll probably just run the project along the 
lines described and see what comes of it :-)
-- 
Freek