[Tagging] Layers (was Eruvs etc.)

[Zeke Farwell]

On Tue, Sep 6, 2022 at 6:50 AM Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:

>
> (I have several thousand such "boundaries slightly overlapping but not
> quite" examples all over the planet. A few of them will probably be
> "unlikely but correct", but most will just be sloppy mapping or sloppy
> importing.)
>
> In my opinion, "layer thinking" means giving up on the shared
> stewardship of the map, and allows everyone to dump their garbage into
> OSM with an excuse of "you can switch that layer off if you do not like
> it". I think it would be detrimental to OSM.
>

These slightly overlapping boundaries are a great example of sloppy
mapping, and I share the concern of garbage data being dumped into OSM.
However, I do not find this to be a strong argument against the concept of
layers.  People seem perfectly capable of garbage dumping with the current
data model.  No layers necessary!  Rather than "layer thinking", I would
call this lazy, narrow minded, or inconsiderate thinking.  In a layer based
OSM data model I'd expect each layer to contain similar object types where
topological connections between them are often appropriate, and the
separation of object types where topological connections are not
appropriate.  For example highways could connect within the highway layer
and boundaries could connect within the boundary layer.  However, the
separation into layers would prevent unwanted connections between highways
and boundaries.

In such a system, properly aligning and connecting boundaries would be just
as encouraged as it is now, and unmotivated mappers would be able to map
boundaries just as sloppily as they do now.  What they wouldn't be able to
do is connect boundaries to highways, land cover, land use, waterways,
etc.  This would make the data easier to work with and maintain since
editing an object of one type would not require also editing other object
types that happen to be connected to it.

--
Zeke Farwell
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