[OSM-talk] Residential areas

[Tom Chance]

Ahoy,talk at openstreetmap.org

On Friday 03 November 2006 13:32, Andy Robinson wrote:
> However the abutters tag is still of interest and use because it allows an
> association to be made between a feature and its immediate neighbour. That
> may have a number of uses in the future.

Being a programming dunce, how hard would it be for a tool to know if a 
feature is within or adjacent to a landuse area?

The answer, to my mind, partly determines what we do with abutters. Maybe it 
would be useful to know what lies left and right of a way, but if we can 
deduce residential/industrial/commercial/retail/etc. from areas then we don't 
need abutters for those values.

It's also much nicer than having to chop a way up into lots of small pieces to 
suit the landuse either side. There are plenty of roads with small rows of 
shops, some houses, a cemetery, some more houses and so on down them, with 
each side being different.

Maybe somebody has a slightly different use for information about a feature's 
immediate neighbour, though? Pavements, land use, appearance of buildings, 
parking spaces and administrative zones, elevation and more may all be useful 
and vary on each side of a feature. This is why I think it'd be better to 
work on the new, improved tagging schema and do it properly, deprecating 
abutters so that they still appear where used but don't get in the way of the 
new, standard method of landuse areas.

Regards,
Tom

-- 
The struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting
 - Kundera