[OSM-talk] Relations not always brilliant

[Sven Grüner]

Lester Caine schrieb:
> Until there is some UNIQUE way of tagging high level relationships 
> consistently, then there seems little point trying to fix fine detail at the 
> lower level. It brings back up the simple problem of producing a unique list 
> of objects in the data. How DO we currently identify all roads in the UK, so 
> that we don't end up with some of the simply silly links that the likes of 
> Autoroute returns when asking for a location.

I'm thinking along those lines as well for a while now. I don't believe 
it suffices to map all boundaries to determine which roads belong to 
which country/city/suburb. Leave alone the fact that many boundaries are 
pretty hard to find or even map. When I've mapped a village with, say, 
20 roads it takes me less than five clicks to group those in a relation 
and adding that relation to the relation of the municipality, town, etc. 
Even with the lowlevel relations support our editors currently have. I 
believe this is far more practical than to require mappers to map all 
relevant boundaries.

I've recently created a sandbox going the whole way from "Planet Earth" 
to "Some Road" all in nested relations. You can browse it here:
http://osm.schunterscouts.de/relation-browser.php
(the URL accepts other relations as well, comments welcome)

regards, Sven