[OSM-talk] Where came the concept of ways, segments, nodes?

[Martijn van Oosterhout]

On 3/21/07, Mike Collinson <mike at ayeltd.biz> wrote:
> May I ask some of our more long standing members where the concept OSM ways, segments, nodes came from?

I don't know exactly (I wasn't there) but I think it came from looking
at existing datasets which mostly work on the basis of polylines. A
line consisting of multiple points. Now, that's terribly inefficient,
so you seperate out the duplication and you get what we have now.

In the process one inefficiency snuck in, namely that ways don't
represent contiguous lines (they don't map exactly to polylines). Of
we could enforce that in the API then we'd be set. The mapnik
converter would probably like that :)

Have a nice day,
-- 
Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog at gmail.com> http://svana.org/kleptog/