[talk-au] What gives with roundabouts?

[Sam Couter]

Sean <4ey0llz02 at sneakemail.com> wrote:
> I never said I was mapping for a particular program or device.  Garmin 
> was just an example.  I'm mapping for all programs and devices.  As all 
> programs or devices can  render a loop way it just makes more since to 
> do it that way.

I don't know of any devices that consume OSM data without some kind of
conversion process. That conversion process is the only way to relate
OSM data to a particular device. So the representation of data in the
OSM database really doesn't matter to any end devices, only to the
conversion.

It's relatively easy for a converter to take, for example, a node tagged
mini_roundabout and substitute a small circular way if that makes sense
for the destination device/format. It's very difficult (call it
impossible) to go back the other way for a device that does actually
understand what a roundabout is.

What you are advocating removes a tag that means something, whatever
that is defined to mean, and replaces it with something that means
nothing in the best case, and is confusing (to the device, hopefully not
the human operator, but then hopefully they're driving, not looking at
the device) in the worst case. It's nearly always best to keep as much
meaning as possible in source data.
-- 
Sam Couter         |  mailto:sam at couter.id.au
OpenPGP fingerprint:  A46B 9BB5 3148 7BEA 1F05  5BD5 8530 03AE DE89 C75C
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