[Merkaartor] translation of data primitives

Martin Feuersänger m at feuersaenger.de
Tue Jan 4 10:42:40 GMT 2011


Chris Browet wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 3, 2011 at 00:27, Richard Lyons <richard at the-place.net>
> wrote:
>
>
>> On Sun, Jan 02, 2011 at 11:46:04AM -0700, James Ewen wrote:
>>
>>
>>> On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 7:04 AM, Christian Kraemer
>>> <christian.kraemer at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>> in german translation "Knoten" is used for "node". Despite very
>>>> common unfortunately "Knoten" in german is "knot" and I doubt that a
>>>> newbie will know, that "Knoten" means something like a dot or point.
>>>>  Next phrase: The OSM "way" term is "Weg" in german translation". I
>>>>
>> would
>>>> prefer "Linie" (means line) to not have to explain why a stream is
>>>> mapped with a "way" data primitive. (As far as I know this was
>>>> valid only once in history :-) What's the situation in other
>>>> languages? Did you use the OSM-terms or more newbie-friendly
>>>> expressions?

As I'm not a GIS expert, I don't know what is used there as there "right"
terminology for these objects.
But for me, with an engineering background, "node" and "way" resp.
"Knoten" and "Weg" make sense.

Those terms align both in German and English with graph theory.
And the data in OSM is nothing but a description of such graphs in all
their varieties.
Check http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphentheorie or
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_theory

In the end this is probably owed to the fact that OSM was initiated by
computer scientist and not by GIS experts.

Cheers,
  Martin


>>>
>>> Well that seems very unfair... why should other languages get newbie
>>> friendly terms and those of us in English still have to deal with node
>>>  and way rather than dot and line? 8)
>>
>> 'Node' is correct in english, but 'way' is a very strange choice of
>> term. 'Line' would be far more natural, or even 'path' (or 'locus').
>>
>>
>
> That's pure OSM terminology.
> I already proposed to OSM to at least to move to GIS terminology (Poiint,
> Linestring, polygon, ...) but that fell into deaf ears
>
>
> - Chris -
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