[Talk-us] Relations, cycle routes, shapefiles

Daniel Sabo danielsabo at gmail.com
Sun Feb 6 00:03:14 GMT 2011


Using semicolons brings us back to "impossible to query without string manipulation".

I agree with you that multiple values per key would have been a better design for many things, it still wouldn't solve the fact that there may be a set of keys (e.g. names) associated with each ref rather than just two refs). Think of route relations as a way to have more than one set of keys per way, as tools get better (and JOSM really has gotten phenomenally better in the last year or so) it will get more and more transparent to the person doing the tagging.

Even if we were tagging by hand using a rich key methodology, under the hood a database would have to convert it to something like a relation to make it usable for rendering. Most of the user unfriendliness in OSM (or even GIS in general) is because the tools don't provide much abstraction from the data.

- Daniel

On Feb 5, 2011, at 3:33 PM, Craig Hinners wrote:

> >[The "rich key" methodology] still can't handle ways that are part of more than one route (e.g. situations like the I-580, I-80 overlap are actually fairly common).
> 
> It can, using semicolon-delimited values. Your example becomes:
> highway:network:us:interstate=580;80
> 
> As an aside, if OSM didn't have the limitation (or benefit, depending on your point of view, I suppose) of not supporting identically-keyed tags on the same object, I'd prefer to use multiple tags with the same key [on the same way]:
> highway:network:us:interstate=580
> highway:network:us:interstate=80
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