[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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