[OSM-talk] wikiproject rail?

[Dominic Hargreaves]

On Tue, Oct 03, 2006 at 04:48:06PM +0100, David Groom wrote:
> I would have thought a way was something more physical.
> 
> If you define a bus route as a way then where do you stop?
> 
> Then you need to think about how each different bus compnay gets stored, 
> would each bus company on the same route lead to a different way.
> 
> How do you keep all this up to date.
> 
> Coach routes would then have to be added in as ways.  On railways each 
> service would be a way, rather than the physical track.
> 
> I'd also argue to keep this out of OSM.

Agreed here. OSM shouldn't try to be all things to all people; what it
should do is try to integrate well with various external data sources
(eg in the rendering stage) and be a good base for physical mapping data.

I think someone mentioned in another thread that we should be as open to
mashups as Google; I'd argue we can do better in terms of integrating
directly with external sources as we come across them.

It may be that we can become the authoritative source for other sorts of
location data, but that shouldn't detract from the core goal, nor create
an unmanagable and out of date database.

Cheers,

Dominic.

-- 
Dominic Hargreaves | http://www.larted.org.uk/~dom/
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