[OSM-talk] Naga City in OSM Re: GML to OSM

[Andy Allan]

On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 10:38 AM, Lester Caine <lester at lsces.co.uk> wrote:

>  > Indeed they haven't. But "making OSM fully relational" is not at all
>  > the same as "adding place labels to countries on small scale maps".
>  > Being able to find out where Naga City is only requires the latter.
>
>  How come it's not the same problem?
>  Where do you get the information from as to WHICH Naga City or even which
>  country you are looking at?

On the main website you can click "Where am I?", that does exactly
what you want. If it's not on another site, then that's hardly an OSM
datastructure problem. The service behind "Where am I?" could be
implemented in a number of ways.

If you want "Philippines" in big letters when you zoom out, then
that's just a rendering enhancement, and should be filed as a ticket
against whichever renderer you're complaining about.

>  Something that has already been discussed is an information box for the corner
>  of a map with reference data, but without information accessible quickly from
>  the data how do you populate that box? Cached data on a tile by tile basis may
>  be possible, but it still requires access to the raw data in the first place
>  and having to search a large adjacent area just to find a country name is
>  silly when a properly managed is_in would return it in the one database query?

I'm guessing you don't have any experience with spatial databases?
bool ST_Contains(geometry_of_polygon, geometry_of_point) and so on?

Cheers,
Andy