[OSM-talk] Segments, ways and order

[Lars Aronsson]

On Monday July 16, Matthias Julius wrote:

> Another solution would be to do away with segments and have ways 
> reference nodes directly. (I know this has been discussed before 
> and a transition would not be trivial.)

This is a myth that we have to kill.  Some seem to believe this 
would be a good idea, a kind of utopia, but assume the change-over 
would be too hard and so nobody dares to try it.  I'd like to 
challenge the latter assumption.

What you actually can do is to download the planet.osm, convert it 
to some other schema, populate your own database and build some 
application on top of that -- maybe a smarter tile renderer.  You 
don't have to change OSM's central database to try the idea.  If 
there are any important improvements in performance or otherwise, 
such a conversion should be able to demostrate this.

This is very similar to the population of a PostgreSQL database 
for mapnik tile rendering.


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se