[OSM-dev] Rendering of "surface"

[Jean-Guilhem Cailton]

Hi,

Sorry if this would be better suited for talk (or another) mailing list.
Just following a thread that was started here, for good reason.

Sincerely, I am surprised to see that there could be "tension" around
that proposal.

It is not about adding objects to the map, but actually about removing
part of the casing of objects that are already there, so this should
make you happy, Andy ;-)

Martin, this is precisely about the rendering of information. Maybe you
never checked how the data you had entered was rendered. I confess that
I do sometimes. It can help find errors. And I think it can help
particularly in the case of fledgling OSM communities, or beginner mappers.
If you read the thread of discussion I was pointing to, you can see that
there were also worries about not misrepresenting the actual status of
"roads" to map users. I've also seen this worry in other geographical
contexts. It is in this sense that a more accurate rendering would help
mapping.
(And of course, these conditions are not the easiest in which to run
customised renderings).

The dotted line convention is common to the (French) paper maps that I
can look at. Applied to ways that would be there anyway, it does not
seem to clutter the map, on the contrary, it makes it more readable to
me. Of course, you can say this is subjective. But it happens to be
there on topographic as well as road maps. This probably means that this
is considered an important attribute of roads.

On a related theme, about "web maps", there was a recent discussion on
talk-fr about G. now using data from the Institut Géographique National.
Many examples were given of "ways" that are rendered the same as
standard roads, even though they are either not drivable, private or
even exist only as projects. Is this the kind of rendering model OSM
would like to follow? Do you think it would encourage a good quality
mapping? Or trust from the users?

It is only natural, and fair enough, that the rendering compromises were
apparently tuned for the UK, since OSM started there, or similar
countries. But if the aim is to map "the whole world", where the global
proportion of unpaved roads or streets is much larger, then maybe slight
adjustment to these compromises could be considered.

Of course, I don't know what the cost (in time and resources) of this
modification would be, nor how the Mapnik team proceeds to test the
modifications. It just seemed, maybe naively, like a reasonable
modification to suggest for potentially large benefits.

Best regards,

Jean-Guilhem


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