[Talk-us] Track or path?

Peter Miller peter.miller at itoworld.com
Tue Nov 11 04:48:50 GMT 2008


> 
> On Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 2:41 PM, Russ Nelson <nelson at crynwr.com> wrote:
> > Should the trail have its own way which shares the bulk of its nodes
> > and path with the railroad way?  Or should the railroad and highway
> > portions of the trail be marked with ... something?  And how to carry
> > the name of the trail the entire length even though it travels on the
> > railroad, highway, and a purpose-built section?
> 
> In theory that's what relations are for, but there doesn't seem to be
> much renderer support except possibly for bicycle routes even though
> there are specifications for other types of routes.
> 
> See http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Relation:route
> 
> I tried marking some sections of Interstate as relations around
> Memphis once using route=road to try to get co-signed routes to render
> right in Mapnik (e.g. with separate markers for each route number),
> but nothing seemed to ever render.
>

This is certainly what route relations are for but you are also right that
the renderers are not yet using them fully (and that cycles are the most
obvious current user).

I have found them very useful to mark local paths, long distance paths,
cycle routes (local, regional and national) and Sometimes I find that the
same way is tagged with a road reference, one or more cycle references and
also one or more paths. Only the road reference is part of the way, the rest
is all done with relations.

It is clearly a challenge for a renderer to display all this information and
in reality we can expect renderers to only display information that relates
to their purpose, so a walking map may not always show the cycle route
numbers, and a cycle map may not show the walking route numbers and road
maps may not show the cycle/walking information.

The use of relations to show overlapping road numbers is also fine, indeed
in time we may decide to code road references in this way as a matter of
course. 

Do bear in mind that Relations are a pretty new idea and you can expect more
support from the tools in the near future. ITO certainly intends to offer
some interesting tools using relations in the future. 



Regards,


Peter Miller
ITO World Ltd
 
> 
> Chris
> 
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