[OSM-talk] Validator Plugin (landuse=forrest+highway=xy)

[spaetz]

On Fri, Nov 23, 2007 at 07:14:58AM +0100, Joerg Ostertag (OSM Munich/Germany) wrote:
> I notice that more and more we get shared nodes for landuse=forrest and 
> highway=xy. I think this normally is not intentional. They should be 
> seperated into two nodes containing only highway=xy ways connected to it and 
> another node only containing landuse=forrest connected to it. Is there an 
> easy way to check this in the validator Plugin? And is there an easy way to 
> resolve this?

I disagree wholeheartedly and will start edit wars with whoever splits my shared nodes between roads/forests :-)!

1) Practicality: The forrest is adjacent to the road. People will use any number of tools in the future to tweak that road and move it a little here and there. Those people will not have mapped the area in the first place, they will not check thoroughly whether there are areas that also need moving close by. For all that it's worth, the forest ends directly at the road.

2) If you really want to make sure that no driver crashes into a tree on the road you should just add a width= tag to notify that it has a certain width. I would then consider adjoining areas to end where the linear feature ends. Otherwise you get into hair-splitting ridiculousness anyway, because you can only use singularity particle cars which have no width at all.
This quickly becomes unrealistic anyway. My +-5meter GPS can't really say whether I am on a road or a meter next to it, so how am I supposed to measure whether a forest starts 50cm next to a road or 1.5m?

3) Renderers usually render linear features over area features and routing software doesn't bother with that either, so for all that its worth, this is a purely academic discussion without practical relevance. And given 2 choices I will always opt for the simpler one.

But whatever floats your boat. If you like to draw lots of nodes and intent to maintain them, then split nodes. Just don't consider it as an invalid situation, because at least i don't.

spaetz