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

[David Groom]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Christoph Burghardt" <Christoph.Burghardt at uni-rostock.de>
To: <talk at openstreetmap.org>
Sent: Monday, July 31, 2006 11:24 AM
Subject: Re: [OSM-talk] How do I tag this road in OSM


> What is the gain of doing this instead of just tagging the segments
> indivually?

1) It gives more flexiblility, as a segment can be shared acrosss several 
ways.

2) Surely it also reduces the amount of data the database has to hold.  Lets 
say there is a street comprised of twenty segments.
If you were to tag each segment with say "highway = primary, abutters = 
residential, name = high street, ref = A3055", then each of those tags has 
to be stored twenty times.  If however you created one way from the twenty 
segments, then tagged the way, those tags only get stored once.

3) If the "high street" segments are tagged 20 times, then if you do a 
search for high street you get 20 results rather than the more meaningful 
one result.

4) If you tag segments with names rather than tagging a way, then Osmarender 
will try and display the name 20 times, which doesn't look good, 
particularly is segments are short (such as round a bend)

David

>
> Can someone please come up with a good definition of what a way is in osm?
> What are they good for? Are ways used in any calculation? Ways can have
> nothing in common despite being a collection from segments. I can
> think of ways, where these segments even doesn't have to be connected.
>
> Until now the only use for ways is to group together the individual
> segments. But after creating a way in JOSM - my favorite editor at the
> moment - it's not possible to add information to the segments anymore
> without deleting and recreating the way.
>
>
> -- 
>
> Christoph Burghardt
>
>
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