[Openstreetmap] Re: Naming segments using applet

[Tom Carden]

On 12/7/05, Immanuel Scholz <immanuel.scholz at gmx.de> wrote:
> Naming line segments as though they are streets was introduced as
> solution to name different sections of a street with another name. So if
> you name "Highway 66" and pieces of this street are usually named "Baker
> Street", you can do this by naming the segments to a different name. The
> segment names will override the street's name which the segments belong
> to.
>
> I am (as a theorist) not very fond of this idea, but it is
> pragmatic. ;-)
>

Do you (as a theorist) have a better suggestion?  Should we just
rename all the streets in the world so they are consistent?  How would
your "street" datatype work?

Note that it's not clear yet whether we'll be doing...

street:
a ---- b ---- c ---- d --- e ---- f
where there is a "street" data type from a to f named "route 66" and
all the segments (a-b, b-c, c-d, etc) are also named "route 66" but
d-e is named "baker street" on the server.

OR

street
a ---- b ---- c ---- d --- e ---- f
where a-b, b-c, c-d and e-f are named "route 66" and d-e is named
"baker street" on the server, but it's up to the client to work out
what's going on, and it's just a matter of modifying the interface to
allow streets to be specified.

At the moment I prefer the latter because it's simpler on the API, but
the former makes a few other things easier so I suspect it's the way
to go.  In the latter way, we wouldn't really care about streets
(they're just collections of segments with the same name) and but we
might infer things about blocks instead for purposes of routing etc. 
Can you tell I like blocks because they can be identified
automatically?

Tom.