[Openstreetmap] more distributed ideas

[Richard Fairhurst]

Quoting Erik Johansson <erjohan at gmail.com>:

> I tried GPSbabel feature to simplify tracks, and you could simplify
> the tracks enormously. But when would you do this simplification?
> Every time you edit a point you would have to redo the simplification
> for that region.

You could run it on a cron job, coupled with some form of versioning. In other
words, edited segments are simplified at (say) 6.00 every morning. The
simplified path expires when it's edited, and the unsimplified version is then
used, for that path only, until 6am the next day.

If you've got a good enough algorithm (like the one in Illustrator) and 
a client
capable of rendering beziers (again, Flash or SVG), you can simplify a 
path into
beziers. This is amazingly efficient - 90%+ savings aren't uncommon.

Richard