[josm-dev] Relation editor support for north/south and east/west similar to forward/backward

[Paul Johnson]

On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 4:00 PM Richard Welty <rwelty at averillpark.net>
wrote:

> On 11/26/13 4:51 PM, Florian Lohoff wrote:
> > Most streets are not strictly on the 90° raster and signposts are
> > only rough directions.
> >
> > Addings this to OSM might make it much more difficult for Data Consumers
> > to process and interpret data.
> >
> what Martjin is after is improving the situation for routing
> engines that use OSM data. in the US at least, highways,
> regardless of their actual direction, are assigned cardinal
> directions and signage frequently uses those directions.
> the premise is that if the cardinal directions are recorded
> in an appropriate manner (e.g., as the roles for ways in
> a route relation) then they are available for the spoken
> directions from a routing widget of some sort.
>

It seems like, six years on, Martjin's goal is pretty well covered by
super-relations at this point, with one relation per direction and that
child relation tagged direction=cardinal.  Meanwhile what even consumes
cardinal directions as roles besides humans attempting to validate
relations and maybe brouter (which also supports the superrelations)?  I'm
not aware of anything that can validate roles as anything other than
forward/backward/empty at this point, JOSM included.