[Tagging] "Relations are not categories" excepted for "type=network" ?

[Pieren]

On Wed, Jul 16, 2014 at 8:17 AM, Jo <winfixit at gmail.com> wrote:
> The same is true for cycling and equestrian networks with numbered nodes.
> There are a few of those networks in Germany as well.
> These are not collections/categories. They are networks of route relations.

Well, you could do the same for all McDonald's restaurants in
Netherlands or all pharmacies in a network or bank branches in Belgium
and say "we move one tag to the upper relation to avoid its
repetition". What is done by such relations can be done by a query in
the database with one or two arguments (like the "operator" or
"network" tag) and a bbox (see XAPI, overpass, etc for more info).
Repeating the network or operator or brand name is not a problem for
many features in OSM. I don't see why we should create an exception
for footway routes.
As it was writen by Frederik Ramm in 2008 ([1]):
"Our database is a spatial database; this means that it has intrinsic
knowledge about the location of objects. If you want to know about all
footways in East Anglia, simply pass in a bounding box of East Anglia
and request all footways, and the collection is made for you
on-the-fly."

Pieren

[1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=Relations/Relations_are_not_Categories&oldid=179750