[OSM-talk] [tagging] Road crossings proposal - status?

[Steve Hill]

On Tue, 6 May 2008, Dave Stubbs wrote:

>>  Chris Jones (who runs the Welsh language OSM) has been working on an AJAX
>>  thing to make fixing road names easy without having to understand the
>>  editors - I see this as a really good thing since it gets more people
>>  contributing to the project, but it does require that the roads themselves
>>  are in the database.
>
> It requires they're in the database correctly. While in theory this
> seems like a great idea, I don't think it's that simple in practice.
> I'd be interested to see what he comes up with though.

Ok, this is a good point.  I guess he's trying to aim at a slightly 
different problem - he is trying to make it easy for people to put in 
Welsh language names for objects, so the assumption is probably that they 
already have English names (and thus the objects themselves are already 
quite sane in terms of their structure, connectifity, etc.).

> Tracing has other problems... there's a possibility it actually
> reduces new mapping as people mistakenly think an area is complete and
> we're having to invest time and effort now in coming up with ways of
> figuring out what's not really been mapped ie:
> http://dev.openstreetmap.org/~random/no-names/

I can see your point, although MapLint _should_ help with this (but 
generally I find that it just clutters up the map with lots of 
not-in-map-features warnings for stuff that _is_ in Map_Features).  It 
would be nicer to be able to turn certain LINT warnings on/off, but this 
would obviously be a lot more heavy-weight in terms of CPU and storage 
since you'd need many layers.

> PS. Please note I'm talking about tracing with no intention of
> surveying yourself to collect on-the-ground data. The aerial imagery
> is an incredibly useful tool in editing the map.

Indeed - I'm constantly wishing that there were decent Yahoo photos for 
Swansea since it would be extremely useful for tracing park boundaries 
private drives, etc.

  - Steve
    xmpp:steve at nexusuk.org   sip:steve at nexusuk.org   http://www.nexusuk.org/

      Servatis a periculum, servatis a maleficum - Whisper, Evanescence