[Talk-us] Separate relations for each direction of US & State highways.

[Martijn van Exel]

James,

This does warrant an explanation for sure. Kristen is one of my
colleagues here at Telenav and we discussed best editing practices for
cardinal direction information here internally. The plan was to take
the discussion to this list before proceeding on any kind of scale. I
managed this poorly and this did not happen yet. For this I apologize!
I have made sure that we take a step back and have this discussion
first before proceeding.

Back to the topic at hand. We discussed options for adding cardinal
direction information to route relations. We considered but dismissed
splitting route relations at direction breaks and adding direction= to
each relation - to my mind, this would make for a contrived relation
hierarchy for a relatively simple information element. The remaining
viable alternative to my mind is then to edit the role tag to reflect
cardinal direction. This makes sense to me for a number of reasons:
leveraging a tag that already exists and does not contain particularly
useful / relevant values (forward / backward); the practice is already
documented and pretty widely used, and lastly, it's transparent and
explicit.

More generally on relation maintenance, I think we may need some
better tools to monitor / repair broken relations. I know there are a
few tools out there (I link to some of them on the relation pages) but
I am wondering if we would benefit from some kind of automated
relation integrity checking? If so what would that ideally look like?
If there's interest, will see what we could do here to build
something.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.
Martijn

On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 11:41 PM, James Mast <rickmastfan67 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Well, one of the main reasons I brought this up is because I've noticed
> another user changing some relations from "forward/backward" to
> "west/east"/"south/north" without discussing this here on talk-us.  That
> user would happen to be KristenK.  This user has been doing this since the
> 11th at least all across the US.  Maybe a block is needed so he can explain
> here on talk-us why he's doing all these mass edits? (or was this a
> challenge on Battle Grid that I wasn't aware of?)  Only reason I just
> noticed this was because a recent change of his edits finally triggered in
> one of my RSS feed watch areas (US-30 WV relation).
>
> Another reason is for those rare US highways that change posted cardinal
> directions within one state (US-98 is posted both North/South and East/West
> in Florida), or change at state borders (US-35 and US-52 do this several
> times).  We need to figure out a way to account for this so that the routers
> give the person the correct info.  As we do know, diagonal routes can be a
> major pain in this area.
>
> -James (rickmastfan67)
>
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-- 
--
Martijn van Exel
OSM data specialist
Telenav
http://www.osm.org/user/mvexel
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:Mvexel
http://hdyc.neis-one.org/?mvexel