[OSM-talk] Missing structure

[Karl Newman]

On Jan 17, 2008 12:52 PM, Lukasz Stelmach <stlman at poczta.fm> wrote:

> Lester Caine wrote:
> > After my missive in the postal addresses thread I had yet another scout
> around
> >   on what is already available and how it is not being managed well.
> >
> > All mapping is currently based on physical nodes, but I think that
> perhaps we
> > need an abstract element that we can hang things on.
> [...]
>
>
> Day by day it becomes more obvious to me that sooner or later
> segments/ways distinction will be back with us. Look at this.
> A way (street) may belong  to many relations, right? Each relation
> may contain different part of the street, right? Especially in big
> cities where bus routes can be relations and each bus may take
> different turns, there will bo no single way/highway comprising more
> than one segment (to be precise I think about lines between
> crossings which in case of curved street may comprise more
> segments). There will obviously MUST be invented 'street' replation
> which takes a few segmetns and gives them common name. The other
> relation (perish?) could contain all the objects that belong to a
> certain place including half of the segments of the streets that
> connects two adjacent places.
>
> This shows a little problem which, however, should be automatable, a
> new object (node/way|segment) has to be assigned to a different
> object (relation) rather then assigning the  place relation to the
> new object.
>
>
> I am just shatring my thoughts, maybe someone can come up with some
> thing wiser ;-)
>
>
It seems to me we're going about this all wrong. Instead of splitting up
ways just because any of its attributes change (or to break it up for a
route), it seems like a way which denotes the same street (or other linear
feature) should be as long as possible. Then we could hang attributes on
subsections of it: i.e., for way 1234, the speed limit from node 5522 to
node 5595 is 100 km/h. Or, way 1234 is a part of route "blue bus" from node
9553 to node 2558. Relations could accomplish this, but they don't have a
rigorous structure to enforce all the parts/data integrity.

Karl
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20080117/732e4c2d/attachment.html>