[Openstreetmap] Re: Naming segments using applet

[Lars Aronsson]

Kendall Sears wrote:

> Before people start digitizing features other than roads/streets 
> it would be advisable to move to a true GIS schema.

I disagree.  There is a time for such a move, but it is yet all 
too early.  We'd paint ourselves into some corner, pretending that 
it was the perfect corner, which it won't be.  Right now we are 
collecting GPS tracks and drawing lines in 2D space.  Then we are 
assigning some names to these lines, and possibly other tags.  
That model is completely naive, and that's what it should be.  

What we really need is not a new data model, but thousands of new 
contributors.  Just think of how "primitive" Wikipedia's software 
is.  No special box to enter the birth date of a composer, just a 
big textarea for everything.

The next logical step would be to extend the search function to 
find these names, i.e. a "street" box next to the city and country 
boxes.  Or everything in the same box, i.e. "Storgatan, Sundsvall, 
Sweden". The same street name might appear in many places within 
the same city, if it is a long street with many segments.  No big 
deal.  Perhaps the search function could draw the matching 
segments in red?  As a transparent overlay?  Such a search 
function will strongly encourage people to enter names on street 
segments.

By the way, did the 5000 segment threshold just change?  
Yesterday I got a beautiful screenshot at 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/wiki/index.php/Image:Osm-dec-2005-58.9-16.4-6.png 
but today most of these segments aren't drawn at this zoom level, 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/index.html?lat=58.9&lon=16.4&zoom=6


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se