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

[Apollinaris Schöll]

On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 6:11 AM, "Petr Morávek [Xificurk]" <
xificurk at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> What worries me is that very often in threads like this, two "arguments"
> and their variations against the change come up.
> 1) You are a bad, because you try to impose your preferences on others.
>

no you are not bad at all. you found a problem and try to fix it. Thats a
good thing to do. Yes it's wrong to impose your preferences on others. But
feel free to try. You won't succeed because of the nature of osm.


> 2) Relations are complex, we should not use them.
>
>
Yes this is a fact no one can ignore. Outside of IT land and other tech
geeks relations are bad. They have been invented for a reason and should be
used where absolute necessary.



>
> 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.


>
> 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.
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.


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.


>
>
> 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.
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