[OSM-talk] Proposed Relations

[Andy Allan]

On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 12:31 PM, David Groom <reviews at pacific-rim.net> wrote:
> The page
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Relations#Proposed_uses_of_Relations
> has a large number of proposed uses of relations, but there never seems to
> be any forward movement on these.
>
> However flawed the voting system for proposed tags is, at least there is a
> recognised procedure, and eventually proposed tags either make it into the
> mainstream of OSM or they don't.

It's a matter of debate as to causation/correlation between the voting
procedures and mainstream OSM :-)

> But this doesn't seem to be the case with
> proposed relations.
>
> I suspect the reason for this might be twofold.
>
> Firstly there is no recognised procedure for moving these forward.
>
> Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, many of the proposed uses of
> relations require some degree of knowledge of what the main renderers /
> other users of OSM data can actually cope with.  So for instance there would
> be no point in me trying to move a particular proposal forward as I don't
> know if in practice the aim of the proposal can be achieved.
>
> I'm afraid I don't have a solution to the problem, but just wanted to flag
> it up as an issue.

I would suggest concentrating on documenting the ones that are in use,
such as multipolygons, cycle route relations. Even better is to
concentrate on the ones that are in the db and widely consumed (by
e.g. a renderer), then on the ones in the db but not widely consumed
(e.g. turn restrictions) and pretty much ignore the fanciful
I-think-it-would-be-great-if suggestions.

Cheers,
Andy