[OSM-talk] Storing extensive notes on points of interest in OSM?

[Michael Collinson]

At 12:53 AM 12/5/2007, Nick Whitelegg wrote:
>Hello everyone,
>
>One thing I'd like to do on Freemap (and have already implemented the code to
>do) is to display information about a point of interest, such as a village,
>pub or peak, when the user clicks on it. You can get an idea of the sort of
>thing I mean by going to Freemap (http://www.free-map.org.uk) and clicking on
>a village or hill; at the moment, all that comes up is a panel on the left
>hand side which links to that POI's Wikipedia article (if any). However what
>I'd like to do is to display notes about that POI.
>
>Do people think this information (e.g. description of a pub, or a 
>hill) should
>go in OSM itself (there'd probably have to be some other tag besides "note",
>as note is usually used for surveying notes) or should another database be
>set up, which links to OSM via OSM IDs?
>
>Thanks,
>Nick

I am glad to see some interest in this one! I personally think that 
having OSM POI pop-ups will put clear blue water between us and 
inferior commercial rivals and am working slowly to that end.

I've already got the tag approved:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Map_Features#Annotation - description

I suggest that for now they go into the main database.  I don't see 
any reason why they can't be later split off into a separate database 
if they volume gets unwieldy (?)

Again in my personal opinion, the information entry should concise 
with links to Wikipedia without trying to compete with it.  My rule 
of thumb is to think of someone who is off-line in the countryside 
with a PDA and OSM or Freemap loaded.  (FYI, I'm writing such an 
application and have just made the big breakthrough of being able to 
download tiles and view them in a pannable environment off-line.)

BTW, I've been experimenting with adding description to ways too and 
have found that a qualifier is often useful. For example,

highway=footway
surface=unpaved
description:bicycle=Ridable with a road-bike but has tree roots in places


Mike
Stockholm