[OSM-talk] Data primitives (was: The segments vs ways vs superways question again...)

[David Sheldon]

On Wed, Jan 03, 2007 at 01:33:02PM +0000, Richard Fairhurst wrote:
> As Jochen suggests, we could maybe come up with a beautiful idealised  
> data model that represents all known geographic features in a tidy  
> database schema. But only GIS professionals would have the knowledge  
> to edit the map. Abstract concepts of superways and groups may create  
> serious confusion when the user comes to OSM with the sole thought "I  
> just want to add my street".

There needs to, and indeed can, be a distinction between the abstraction
that users/editors use, the abstraction that programmers use and the way
that the data is stored ultimately. Users shouldn't have to know how it
is stored. At the moment there is only a very thin abstraction between
the user and the database. We need to make this thicker rather than
ruining the database. When you edit wikipedia you don't know how they
are storing the revisions, or if the talk: pages are in the same table
as the main page.

At the moment we haven't built-up the tools to allow everyone to use our
system. This is why many of the users are high-tech users, but it will
be quite hard to build the perfect interface, and at the moment all of
the users are served by the current interface (by definition). Improve
the data model and the API and more people might write interfaces to it
that can be used by less-technical users.

On the other hand, people who can't understand how to join up dots are
not going to understand the finer points of database rights and
copyright law, and so might polute our data set and so end up causeing
more work than they complete.

David
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