[OSM-talk] Relations not always brilliant

Richard Fairhurst richard at systemeD.net
Mon Apr 7 11:22:20 BST 2008


Frederik Ramm wrote:

> I assume it will usually be easier to check a machine-readable  
> relation than to compare tags. A grouping relation is a more  
> abstract thing and can be used for other purposes (i.e. many ways  
> might together make up the "city bypass", but this might not depend  
> on the road "ref" but on the road name). I assume that anyone  
> working with the data in earnest will have to support relations  
> anyway, so it seems unnecessary to ask them to also group by tags  
> which involves finding out which tags to group by, which bounding  
> box so search in, splitting tag values at semicolons etc.

IMO it's _always_ better to optimise for ease of editing and  
maintenance, than for ease of use by developers.

Any non-trivial use of OSM data is going to require postprocessing  
anyway. One of our failures, as a project, is that we don't provide  
enough widely used/actively developed libraries in common languages  
for working with OSM data - libraries that would do exactly what you  
suggest (grouping by tags, etc.). Much better to work on these than  
to raise the (already too high) editing barriers for new mappers.

> My original point "why not get used to it now" is perhaps the more  
> important one; we're still very much at the beginning concerning  
> relations and the more people get exposed to relations, the better  
> we'll be able to work with them and use them productively.

You could start by making JOSM's relations UI as good as Potlatch's.  
<grins, ducks and runs>

cheers
Richard




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