[OSM-talk] is_in and similar tags

[David Earl]

Andy Allan wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 28, 2009 at 4:09 PM, David Earl<david at frankieandshadow.com> wrote:
> 
>> The reason I gave was for name searching, not routing. It allows the
>> result of a search to be given a descriptive context that isn't
>> currently possible any other way.
> 
> It allows the result of a search to be given a descriptive context
> that isn't currently possible in any other way *that you want to
> code*.

that I want to code *now*. I did say in my first message that polygons 
were desirable, I just don't want to throw away what we've got until 
such time as the various solutions and data that have been mentioned are 
in place.

is_in is a pragmatic solution to a problem we haven't *yet* solved 
another way.

I have lots of ideas of things I would like to do with searching which 
would be vastly easier if we had boundary tests, and as it happens I 
have been thinking about ways to address this before this debate, so I 
may well be the person who ends up writing some code to do this.

Regarding inconsistency, yes that's a problem for automatic processing 
(though not insurmountable in most cases, just makes it a bit more 
complicated). For human readers though its a doddle, and in the case of 
the Syndey suburbs, at least you can read in a set of search results 
that this one is in Australia not Canada.

If there's errors in them, I don't see the difference between those and 
any other errors in the map.

David