[Openstreetmap] ontology, money

[Nick Whitelegg]

> Hi folks
>
> Sorry got distracted by something else, but:
>
> Ontology:
> - I'm personally for higher level human readable ontologies rather than
> bitwise.

A few more thoughts on the bitwise idea: it's not so much for the database 
itself, but I'm thinking that, in terms of transferring data between 
OpenStreetMap and its clients (websites such as Freemap or other software 
such as map editing applications), the size of the XML-RPC message would need 
to be as small as possible to minimise bandwidth. My feeling here would be, 
rather than have multiple tags in the form

<foot>yes</foot>
<bike>yes</bike>
<horse>yes</horse>
<car>no</car>

the "permissions" on a particular track should be combined via bitwise 
operations e.g.

<track>
<perm>1</perm>
<pts>
....

For the database itself, rather than the bitwise idea the best thing would 
probably be (as Matt, I think, suggested) that it would be best storing the 
permissions on a track as flags e.g. the relevant table could have fields 
"foot" "bike" "horse" or "car" each of which could be either on or off,.

Nick