[OSM-talk] Relations not always brilliant

[Richard Fairhurst]

Lester Caine wrote:

> I harp back to *MY* original request.

I thought you might. ;)

> That there is a mechanism created for
> managing hierarchical data properly.

You can superimpose a "structure" on OSM two ways: either through  
forcing the data to be entered and tagged in a certain way, or  
through post-processing.

Imposing it simply via data entry will not work for our community. It  
requires either strict rules on what data is entered (can't work with  
a user-base growing at the rate ours is), or for the editing software  
to provide a greater level of abstraction, and experience shows that  
many of our users _resent_ abstraction - they want to control exactly  
what's going into the database.

So it has to be via post-processing - and this has the advantage that  
two people can derive a completely different structure from the same  
database. And, again, let's work on the libraries to make this as  
easy as possible.

I agree with your later point that it would be good to have a  
mechanism of finding out what's in each country (and, ultimately,  
county/département/länd/whatever) - but rather than requiring  
everyone to tag with some new hierarchical equivalent of is_in, let's  
use the boundaries that people are already drawing to set up a  
"painted" image of the world, coastline-style, with a lookup service.  
Would be a great GSoC project sometime... next year!

cheers
Richard