[OSM-talk] Mapping canals

[Michael Collinson]

I am rabidly anti-imperial :-)  yet whole-heartedly concur with Abi's 
sentiments and approach.  OSM is a "folksonomy" and one of the most 
important things to me is to lower the bar for folks to enter data 
without reading a detailed specification and without having to 
perform pre-processing or pre-calculation (that is what a computer is 
for). If that makes the database slightly less elegant or processing 
slightly more complex, that is a sacrifice worth making.

Mike
Stockholm

At 01:00 PM 1/24/2008, Abigail Brady wrote:
>On Jan 24, 2008 11:26 AM, Martijn van Oosterhout 
><<mailto:kleptog at gmail.com>kleptog at gmail.com> wrote:
>I'm also worried about people using gauges adding 5ft 5in somewhere,
>we should at least require decimals.
>
>
>I've tagged low bridges in Leicester with maxheight=15'0", for 
>example.  That's what the sign on the bridge says, that should be 
>represented in the database.
>
>We need for the UK to keep imperial measurements in the DB.  Now, I 
>abhor imperial measurements and want to see us completely 
>metricated, so please don't mistake me for some kind of rabid 
>anti-metric person.  But the signs say things in feet and inches and 
>that is a fact.  This discussion should not be about a bunch of 
>non-UK people declaring that UK people aren't allowed to use the 
>unit system the UK (regrettably) uses in the database, but instead 
>it should be how this can be best done in a way that tools don't get 
>too confused by.
>
>Please let us have that conversation.  The idea of a cron job is 
>slightly absurd but nontheless is a thought in the right 
>direction.  There are many options.  I think defining a very small 
>set of allowed units and formats thereof, and then sample code in 
>many languages to convert these to metres/kilograms, might be the solution.
>
>--
>Abi
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20080124/269ea71b/attachment.html>