[OSM-talk] How to tag lanes, not ways, was: Deprecating the use of Tag:highway=stop in favour of Key:stop

[JigPu]

On Sun, Aug 30, 2009 at 9:14 PM, John Smith <deltafoxtrot256 at gmail.com>wrote:

> 2009/8/31 Roy Wallace <waldo000000 at gmail.com>:
>
> That sounds more or less what I had in mind, yes, except the example
> osm file used relations acting as children of the way almost, why
> can't ways simply have children of their own instead of using
> relations?


I understand why you feel that using a way+node relation or way+direction
tag may be a hack, but "children" are also a hack. Children not only only a
single problem (that of a way being asked to take on additional metadata
that really belongs to only a portion of the way) but solves it by poorly
duplicating relations! Relations are capable of modeling the same
parent-child relationship you desire and exist precicely to relate many
pieces into a whole.

I'm not saying that the "lane and lane group" proposal is perfect either. In
my opinion it abuses relations so as not to upset the status quo too much.
Personally I think
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Relations/Proposed/Collected_Ways does a
much better job of using relations correctly. Multiple sub-ways are related
to each other, with the relation holding the generic tags and sub-ways
containing any overriding information. If renderers supported it, it'd be
the ideal way of representing "child" ways.



Somewhat tangentally, while finding the Collected Ways proposal I stumbled
across the "enforcement" relation. It's an "approved" use of relations and
acts almost identically to the stop relation proposal. Though this doesn't
mean it's not a hack, it does indicate that the community seems to be ok
with using relations in the way proposed.
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