[OSM-talk] How do I tag this road in OSM

[SteveC]

* @ 01/08/06 11:00:10 AM 80n80n at gmail.com wrote:
> I'd really like someone to highlight why segments are actually necessary.  I
> believe that ways with an ordered list of nodes would do the same job.  I
> must be missing something but no one has yet been able to explain what I am
> missing.  I hoped that Steve would enlighten me, but he was away at the time
> of the earlier thread and didn't pick up on it.  Maybe he'll chip in now
> (Steve?).

When OSM started a few people said 'rah rah WSF-T rah rah'. I took one
look at it (or rather the number of pages to the specification) and
figured that I'd just do anything practical to get things going.

This meant nodes and segments. I could see ways would be harder and I
wasn't sure what the best way of doing it was. It meant throwing away
the GPX files in the beginning... anything to actually get a site up.

As they stand, ways are being used as a collection of segments and the
segs arn't being tagged with anything. This wasn't how I thought it
would go. I figured that a way might be oneway, but the one segment at
the top that wasnt oneway could be tagged as such and 'override' the way
properties for just that segment. Instead from what I've seen people are
tagging this up as two seperate ways.

I don't actually care how it's done, I'm just saying that the way I
thought it would go is significantly different.

So yes, maybe all the segments should be converted in to ways of nodes,
and ways similarly. Then you can tag with area=yes to get areas too.

Since I'm in a bit of flux about whether to change the db drastically
with the rails implementation perhaps this is the time to do it, too.

have fun,

SteveC steve at asklater.com http://www.asklater.com/steve/