[Tagging] More human readable values for traffic signs

[Richard Fairhurst]

On 29/10/2015 20:40, Colin Smale wrote:
> How can that spatial lookup be made very cheaply? How long will it take
> to do a point-in-polygon for every road sign in Europe?

It's very cheap. I do polyline-in-polygon for every single road and path 
I render on cycle.travel, because I have different rendering styles for 
urban and rural areas. The polygons (160,000 in Western Europe) are a 
significantly more complex dataset than countries would be, yet the 
query to update the roads is trivial, and plenty fast considering it's 
every single road.

Do you have hands-on experience in the subject that counters that?

 > I understand one
 > should not denormalise lightly, but it is sometimes justifiable. We need
 > to keep the data easily consumable as well. Saying that two extra
 > characters in the tagging will present an unreasonable barrier to
 > mappers is stretching a point I think.

It's very easy for you, as an experienced mapper, to say that. Wikipedia 
is a salutary lesson in what happens to projects who start to tilt the 
editing experience principally towards the experienced.

"Since 2007... well-intentioned newcomers are far less likely to still 
be editing Wikipedia two months after their first try."

http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/520446/the-decline-of-wikipedia/

Richard