[OSM-talk] Inheritance of roles in nested relations

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Hugh Barnes wrote:
> It's a shame. You have to admit it's a useful device and would reduce
> duplication of work (creation and maintenance) and storage
> significantly.

Sure but it's not something that should be done on the API level. The 
API is intended as an as-simple-as-possible storage engine. How you 
interpret data coming out of the API is your (the client's) choice.

> I am thinking of this metadata on the relations to explicitly recommend
> inheritance "treatment":

[...]

> I know I could just do this, but would I get community support? Is it
> necessary to set up a poll or RFC?

I believe people are already doing this to map long roads 
(country-spanning motorways) in Germany - without the special tags you 
suggest. It might be worthwhile for you to analyze these existing uses.

I think that in the long run, all tools should be able to, on a 
fundamental level, accept a relation everywhere they would expect a way, 
and then substitute the relation's members. Which would apply 
recursively and thus neatly solve your problem. I'm not sure there is a 
need to explicitly tag the fact that something is a "parent" or "child" 
relation in your case.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"