[Openstreetmap] openstreetmap.org updates, ontology stuff

[Matt Amos]

On Friday 18 March 2005 15:48, SteveC wrote:
> So I'm implementing an open classification scheme where you can add
> properties of roads (cycle path, road type, 2 lane...) and types of
> Point of Interest (burger king, tube station...) as you like.

by "road" i assume you mean "line segment", so that we use the same 
types for roads, train tracks, waterways, footpaths, coastlines, 
region/park/field boundaries, etc...

> Of course all this is wiki'd so if someone deletes the key '13
> means motorway' then you can undo it.

why have numeric id's at all?

> This stuff is half-implemented, thought I'd open it up to y'all.
> There are some interesting restrictions like one Nick brought up:
> It would be nice to do bit masking on this, so 0-15 are roads,
> 16-31 are motorways (or whatever bit range you want).

why not just have arbitrary free-text UTF-8 strings for (key, value) 
pairs? so instead of a table of numeric ID's we just have a table of 
"int id, string key, string value". for example, where line segment 
12345 is part of oxford street:

ID  key  value
12345 name Oxford Street
12345 type  main road
12345 one-way false
12346 name Tottenham Court Road
12346 pc_hardware_prices very high

imho this would be better, but it isn't as easy to do bit-masking any 
more!

cya,

matt
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