[Openstreetmap] Re: Naming segments using applet

Immanuel Scholz immanuel.scholz at gmx.de
Thu Dec 8 07:26:07 GMT 2005


Hi,

> I think with all this talk of streets being a special case of track,
> we risk over-generalising, and making bad tools that don't do anything
> well.

I will never try to force a large group of people (the users) to
restrict them to streets. If they do by themself and enter only streets,
then you are right and the name "street" for the name of the data
structure behind the thing they just entered fits.

But if people start to enter non-streets with the tools they get then
"street" is most confusing to other programmers. Much more than any
generic name for a linear thing which is almost only used as a street.


> Why don't we get streets right first?

It is not up to the programmers, what the user enter in osm.

Well, some kind of. The clients can try to direct users, as example by
not implementing certain requested features but I dislike this.
In a wiki, not the coder of the wiki decide what is entered but the user
of the wiki.


> Has openrivermap gone yet?  No?  openwaymap?  Meanwhile I'll be
> concentrating on streets ;)

This opens another interesting question: Should the data structure we
create be usable by other software beside Openstreetmap?

My answer to this question would be:
If it does not complicate the OSM server and clients, why not? But I am
against introducing much complexity only to support others.

<development-stuff talk. non-developer may ignore>
The current system of having just key/value pairs that define the real
ontology on objects is very generic and powerful and could be reused in
other servers, as example "openrivermap" (if our users decide that
rivers should not belong to an open street map). "track" (or "way" or
"line" or "route") does not implies that the structure may hold only
streets. It is already an ontology definition of the abstract thing of a
connection between two points.

Defining too much ontology within the names of the data types will
destroy (or much confuse) the general usage. The advantage is faster
understanding the one original meaning osm had for these structures.
</development-stuff talk. non-developer may ignore>


But to be honest: In the end, it does not matter. Things can be changed.
It will be a frustrating afternoon, but it still takes only one
afternoon (with "eclipse" and java about half an hour ;-) to change all
references of "street" to "track" in a program, so if people start to
enter rivers into a data structure named "street", the structure name
can be changed to some more fitting then.


Ciao, Imi.

PS: There is already one client to openstreetmap that like to have
landscape features other than streets to better draw nice maps: freemap.






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