[Talk-in] Border state | districts

[michael lohr]

Am 16.12.2009 12:18, schrieb Harshad RJ:
> Folks,
>
> Micha and I had some conversation about this off-list and I requested 
> that it be discussed here.
>
> My understanding may not be complete and Micha obviously has more 
> knowledge. Here are my thoughts anyway...
>
> The Relation approach seems to be the new way of doing things, but 
> from what I could gather there isn't a complete consensus on it.
i wasn't aware of that. link?
>
> On the one side, it reduces the burden on the renderer to deduce 
> relations between boundaries and areas; on the other it puts the onus 
> on the map editor to manage them.
>
> I personally feel that putting the onus on the map editors is not the 
> right way, cause of the effort involved and because humans are more 
> likely to make mistakes. In the long run, implementing a better 
> renderer + relation deducer will be better.
i disagree. working with relations is a lot easier for the editor (might 
not be true in our case though, cause the overlapping lines are there 
already and we would have to remove them). draw just one line, add it to 
the appropriate realtion with one click.

besides, the mapping should represent the situation on the ground as 
exactly as possible. in case of borders: there's not 5 borders there, 
just one. but the meaning of this one border depends on the context 
you're viewing it in. that's much better represented by one line and a 
couple of relations.
>
> In the short term, if I understand correctly, the only hitch with the 
> current approach is that borders will overlap.
that's a big hitch in my opinion. it might not be visible if rendered 
and you configure the renderer properly. but it will produce a lot of 
duplicate (and therefore useless) lines. just consider a a district on a 
national border. you'd have 6 lines on top of each other country a+b, 
state a+b, district a+b.
>
> cheers,
> Harshad