[Talk-us] Per-State relations for the Appalachian Trail

[OSM Volunteer stevea]

Kevin Kenny <kkenny2 at nycap.rr.com <mailto:kkenny2 at nycap.rr.com>> writes:
> Breaking apart the AT into separate relations - ideally with a superrelation joining them - would be sensible, I think, but be careful about the assumption about state lines. The AT literally spends a good many miles with the hiker having one foot in North Carolina and the other in Tennessee - the ridge that it follows is the state line.

Yes, “break apart elements so they are in a single state” simply does not make logical sense here, so I believe that “logical senseless" alone is a good reason for not doing so — it would needlessly frustrate somebody to implement this.  There is likely very wide agreement here, but it bears repeating:  be sensible, but not slavish to an ideal where it doesn’t make sense to do so.

> We also, I think, need to put some more thought simply into the support of large relations. I've recently found that even the New York Long Path (only a fifth the length of the AT) crashes JOSM (I haven't yet diagnosed the problem) and wound up editing in Meerkartor instead. Trails, highways, rivers, railroads, we have a good many places where things reasonably and predictably break down into thousands of parts over thousands of km, and I don't think we yet have a unified theory of how to handle them.

It would be nice to “have a unified theory,” yes.  However, as this could be fraught with endless discussion of “should we here?” or “what’s the best method there?” I’d say letting common sense guide us is a very good place to start and use as an approach.  “Along state lines” certainly settles out of that nicely, and so it sounds like OSM in the USA both does already and can continue going forward like this.  When it doesn’t or something else DOES make sense (especially MORE sense) then, do that, instead.  Eventually, “more firm rules” might be established.  And as this continues to get discussed, there might even be some relief from tools (editors, the database itself) which are better written or can better accommodate larger relations, although I don't hold my breath about that.  Super-relations can help, but they are not always the answer, either, and some renderers or other data consumers don’t completely implement them as you might hope.  Sometimes technology “naturally” grows to accommodate “entire planet sized” data size problems, then again, sometimes very focussed, specific efforts are required to “fix” things.  Those seem like they will (and have) make themselves more obvious as we go along.

Cheers,
SteveA
California
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-us/attachments/20160504/4e064f27/attachment.html>