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

[Tom Hughes]

In message <a4c775140712050034v5b962f18rb384627b0e14f4e3 at mail.gmail.com>
        Dave Stubbs <osm.list at randomjunk.co.uk> wrote:

> On 04/12/2007, Nick Whitelegg <nick at hogweed.org> wrote:
>
>> 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?
>
> If you want to heavily format the description and if it's possible to
> go to several kb then I'd probably keep it out purely because editing
> it would be a pain. It's more likely you'll get accidental corruption
> etc.

I would tend to agree with that - our tagging infrastructure is really
designed to handle simple facts not long essays.

In fact you'll find you can't store keys or values larger than 255 bytes
for ways or relations. For nodes there doesn't seem to be a limit but
that is probably more because they all get squashed together into one
field than because anybody was trying to allow very long data.

> On the other hand if it's just "This is a nice pub. Try the xyz ale.
> Has a playground out back" then I'd put it in the db.

I'd be slightly dubious about some of that even - the playground is a
fact, but the other things are very much personal opinion rather than
a fact about the pub.

Tom

-- 
Tom Hughes (tom at compton.nu)
http://www.compton.nu/