[OSM-talk] Proposal: No white on the map

[Archimedeus B]

Hi All,

with the new JOSM creating landuse areas e.g. residential is not very
comfortable. While I assume that will be enhanced sooner or later, I'd like
to share an idea.

My general assumption is that many areas end at ways. For example industrial
and residential areas are often separated by streets, as are residential
areas and forests. In the old api I liked to re-use segments for getting
clean areas which were abutting also in the biggest zoom level. Commercial
navi system maps seem to do the same.

My proposal is to have an area selection function in JOSM and potlatch. In
the area mode any click selects an area that is surrounded by ways.
ALT+Click adds another area to selection, ctrl+click takes reduces the
selected area from selection. Areas can be merged and split. A selection
takes the smallest possible area of tagged and untagged ways around the
clicked spot.

This can be done without changing the data structure, if the renderer and
groups of ways are aware of the direction. If, for example, an area contains
one way that has the wrong direction, it gets a reverse bit in the group
that builds the area. This would also overcome the issue that many ways have
to be doubled, because their direction does not fit into an intended area.

With this suggestion it should be much easier to set the right landuse tags.
It would be even easy to tag every single peace of the map with very few
additional ways. This would be a great advantage to commercial maps which
usually have many spaces where the map is simply white. I believe we could
make it better and tag any white space into something useful, as farmland,
fields, grass or whatever. It just needs a practical way of doing it. What
do you think?

Archimedeus
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