[OSM-talk] Please do not tag streets (yet).

[Tom Carden]

On 3/13/06, Immanuel Scholz <immanuel.scholz at gmx.de> wrote:
> Hi everyone.
>
> I want to ask you whether you could currently wait with tagging massive
> line segments with different properties (name, class etc.) which original
> should belong to a street ("way") rather than to a line segment.
>

I talked to Steve briefly about this at the weekend, and it's worth
summarising my suggestion here.

The applet and other clients should be built consistently around a
streets/ways model, and concentrate on getting the workflow simple and
effective.

Conversion from segments to streets should be a short-term focused
activity (a new WikiProject?) and when it's done these tools should be
phased out.  It shouldn't be possible to create segments that aren't
part of a street.

So, we're going to need tools and scripts to help us upgrade existing
segment data to the new streets model.  Here are two processes which I
think could be nearly automatic (supervised conversion, basically).

Process 1:

Look for segments with the same name and then merge the path between
them into a street with the same tags.  If any segments in between
have different tags, then preserve those tags on the segments.  If
segments have the same tags as the street, remove those tags.

Process 2:

Look for a tagged segment and convert all the segments within that
'block' into a street.  Then merge all connected block-streets with
the same name into streets.  Again, any unusual tags on segments
should be preserved, but tags which are already on the street should
be removed.

(A block is a collection of nodes/segments between two nodes with more
than two segments attached.  There's probably a better definition but
that's the best I can do right now).

Any thoughts?

Tom.