[Talk-us] Boundary Relation and Tagging

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Mike Thompson wrote:
> It is my understanding that if all members of a relation share the
> same tag value the relation should be tagged and not the individual
> members. I have discovered several boundary relations in my local area
> that do not follow this principal.  For example, relation 112396
> references ways 33118788, 33118777, 33118789 and 33118727 (among
> others) but all are tagged with essentially the same information.
> Should duplicate tagging be removed from the members?

As a very general rule, I would always advise against "cleanup edits". 
If you touch an object for some other reason, and then you find that it 
carries tags you think are superfluous, then remove them. But if you are 
not planning to add any information, then just leave well alone and 
don't touch 100s of objects just to "clean up". This doesn't really 
improve anything, but it has a double adverse effect: (1) a new version 
of the full object is created in the database, and the full previous 
version is kept in the history records, i.e. removing one tag from a 
1000-node way means eight to ten KB extra in our database, and (2) the 
way is now "last modified in 2011 by Mike Thompson" which could lead 
others to think that you know anything about that border or even checked 
it correctness in 2011 when all you did was "clean up".

In your special case, I would recommend to at least keep the 
"boundary=administrative" on the ways even if you are right in saying 
that, if they are members of a boundary relation, they don't need tags 
at all; keeping that tag will immediately tell everyone what this way is 
for even if they don't look at relations (not all tools do that properly).

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"