[OSM-talk] Administrative boundaries along roads

[Jeff Spirko]

On Sun, Mar 21, 2010 at 8:12 PM, John Smith <deltafoxtrot256 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 22 March 2010 07:35, Mike N. <niceman at att.net> wrote:
>>   How will boundary relations help?  They must still refer to a closed way
>> in order to define the administrative boundary.
>
> Maybe he meant re-use the road as part of a relation, instead of
> having 2 ways that share the same path...
>
> Due to the poor handling of relations this is a bad idea imho, even if
> the boundary runs down the middle of the road people screw things up,
> I've been pushing for admin boundaries to be hidden by default in
> browsers to reduce problems, especially with newbies that don't get
> some of the more advanced concepts...
>
> https://josm.openstreetmap.de/ticket/4236
>

It would certainly be nice if admin boundaries could be protected from
accidental changes.  One way to implement is for the editor to add a
read-only bit to each object that gets loaded.  Various types of
objects should then be read-only by default, depending on their tags.
I could see this being useful for boundary=, natural=, landuse=, etc.
These objects (including child objects like nodes) would be read-only
in the editor.  The user should be allowed to mark these objects
read-write when necessary, in case they actually do need to be edited.



-- 
Jeff Spirko   spirko at gmail.com   spirko at lehigh.edu   WD3V   |=>

The study of non-linear physics is like the study of non-elephant biology.