[OSM-talk] collection/street relation: which one to use?

[John F. Eldredge]

When you say "process a nearby-search for the street name", how broadly is "nearby" interpreted?  Nashville, TN, USA, where I live, has a number of instances of streets that were split by later construction.  For example, McGavock Pike extends both north and south of the airport; the airport construction replaced the middle portion of the street, resulting in a gap of about three miles between the two sections.  Also, since the city's expansion caused it to swallow up a number of smaller communities, there are some duplicate street names that have to be distinguished between by the postal code (referred to as the Zip Code).  I also know of at least one case where a street number occurs more than once on the same long street, but with different postal codes and, originally, different town names (the road in question was originally the highway connecting the two small towns).

-------Original Email-------
Subject :Re: [OSM-talk] collection/street relation: which one to use?
From  :mailto:wendorff at uni-paderborn.de
Date  :Wed Aug 18 17:36:58 America/Chicago 2010


  On 18.08.2010 19:21, Anthony wrote:
>   put a reference to the street into the way
> for the building, not a way to put a reference to the building into
> the way for the street.  One possibility is to just use
> addr:street=way:37863 or addr:street=relation:28917.  But as there
> would be no maintenance of referential integrity, that wouldn't be
> without its dangers.
Isn't addr:street="Main Street" enough?

pro's:
- to search for a house, only searching through local tags (of nodes or
areas describing buildings/housenumbers) is enough.
- to search for the associated street of the house process a
nearby-search for the street-name, as the same streetname usually
doesn't appear twice in a city
- maintaining is easy as changing ways for the street don't care.

Navigation systems should IMHO do some preprocessing to the data - means
e.g. connecting houses to nodes at the street for routing.

con's:
references in attributes are error prone, I fear.
1) some people reuse old ways when editing (should not be, but is often
the case)
2) deletions, edits and additions would break the relation, if not
maintained carefully, what's a lot of work.

So I prefer to add the street name to the street (as name) and
addr:street to the building/shop etc.

regards
Peter

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-- 
John F. Eldredge -- john at jfeldredge.com
"Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all." -- Hypatia of Alexandria