[OSM-talk] Relations not always brilliant

[David Earl]

On 08/04/2008 19:02, Lester Caine wrote:
>> You don't think that searching for "M11" should produce one result for a
>> road that covers the whole country, and searching for high street should
>> produce hundreds of separate results?
> 
> This is EXACTLY the problem I'm trying to highlight!
> The CURRENT data produces hundreds of High Street's and a large quantity of 
> them are duplicates. You can not produce a single set of 'High Street' 
> objects, ADDED to which identifying the LOCATION of each 'High Street' is an 
> even sillier exercise.
> This is why we need to agree a method of identifying unique versions of an 
> object such as 'High Street', 'Evesham', 'Worcestershire', 'England'. And then 
> we can find High Street, Evesham from all of the other High Streets, and 
> HOPEFULLY identify all of the segments that make it up.
> The missing piece of the jigsaw is a means if linking all of the High Street, 
> Evesham segments into one object, so that a search only produces ONE result.

Well, this is partly the problem the Name Finder sets out to solve. You 
will notice that if you search for "High Street, Ely" (the one in 
Evesham, if there is one, isn't mapped, so I've changed the example) you 
don't get several results which are the component ways of that 
particular High Street (assuming there is more than one - I've not 
looked), but you do get other nearby High Streets.

It would be easier to do this if the components were related, but it 
isn't an insoluble problem if they aren't. You don't get duplicates with 
the name finder for this kind of street.

However, you *do* get *useful* duplicates for the M11. Not every single 
little piece, but at useful intervals along it. So if you say "M11 near 
Bishops Stortford" you get one bit, the nearest to the town (and then a 
few more successively further away), and "M11 near Saffron Walden" gets 
you a different bit.

Because it is such a long road, as you say pointing at one point only on 
it is not helpful. So I don't. But pointing at every artificially 
divided up part of a road isn't helpful either. So I don't.


David

(PS I notice something's gone wrong with the sorting in the name finder 
- I'll look into that).