[Tagging] Data redundancy with "ref" tag on ways vs relations

[Simone Saviolo]

2012/7/31 Apollinaris Schöll <aschoell at gmail.com>

>  Instead of saying "don't impose your views on others", you should
>> provide an argument why the proposal is bad and ideally, propose
>> alternative solution to the presented problem. This way, I can react
>> with counter-argument, or admit that the original proposal was bad, and
>> after few iterations a real solution can be reached.
>>
>
> arguments will not help much here. osm has somewhere around 20000 active
> users http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Stats
> a small fraction is reading  these lists or forum posts. Whatever you
> propose here will not even reach most mappers. You cant teach them how to
> map your way. They don't even now how great your proposal was. And they
> will break your "perfect" data and you have to fix it or we are back where
> you started.
>

Oh, please! Good, tidy data is self-mantaining. People working with it,
unless they're utterly incompetent (and I don't mean incompetent at OSM,
but at any thing ordered and clean), will easily recognize a pattern, and
will act consequently. On the other hand, if they see that some street
names are written all caps, others capitalized, others all lowercase,
others capitalized wrong, they'll easily assume there's no rule at all
(they won't even think about the fact that there might be one!), and will
add confusion to the confusion.


> ad 2)
>> This is actually not an argument against any tagging proposal, but
>> argument for improving relation handling in editors.
>
>
> Do you know how many editors are out there? and there are bots all kinds
> of scripts with API upload support ... Feel free to fix all of them. As far
> as I know not a single editor for mobile applications has any relation
> support.
>

...and here's why CSS is now a forgotten, pityful attempt that has justly
been abandoned. No, wait.


>  I use mostly JOSM which has good relation support. But still it's a pain
> and a challenge. Just downloading a huge relation takes too much time. No
> editor can fix this because it's the nature of the data model.
>

What's painful and challenging in double clicking and using a window which
is exactly the same tag table as the one you have for nodes and ways, plus
an obvious self-explaining list of members with roles?


>
> The problem of roads tagging, was brought up in talk-cz several times.
>> The problem is that current tagging scheme is semantically wrong - e.g.
>> we have only one primary road number 2, but OSM data says we have
>> several hundreds of them. The same for named residential streets in
>> cities. This causes several problems.
>> It makes it hard for data producers to edit the road, because you have
>> the information about it duplicated over several hundreds of segments.
>> It makes it hard for data consumers to present the data in a meaningful
>> way -
>
>
> really? I can't see that. there are many map rendering solutions, routing
> algorithms for desktop, web service, mobile devices ... Must be a miracle
> that they all function.
> btw I am not aware of many using relations.
>

What would consumers' assumptions be, reasonably? That any ways with the
same value in a given tag would have to be considered a single thing? I
have examples of separate streets with the same name in the same city, not
separate, non-connected parts of the same street, mind you. A relation here
would describe the reality without fail, and much more elegantly. .


>
>
>>
>> When I see this thread (and others like this) and all the resistance
>> (with little arguments) that any proposed change causes at global OSM
>> level, I'm starting to think that we (in Czech Republic and other
>> communities as well) should simply go ahead and play by our own rules at
>> our own backyard and just ignore the global consistency.
>>
>
> nothing wrong with that. But be aware that all these local communities
> have to come up with their own solutions to use the data.  Is the Czech
> community large enough to offer maps, routing in all flavors and other
> useful applications? probably it's much easier to go with the flow and bear
> a with some oddities.
>

According to your reasoning, Germans should tell us how to map because they
make tools and consumers. Is this correct?

Regards,

Simone
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