[OSM-talk] Editor without relation-support makes sense?

Jukka Rahkonen jukka.rahkonen at mmmtike.fi
Thu Mar 25 10:27:12 GMT 2010


Frederik Ramm <frederik <at> remote.org> writes:

> Tirkon wrote:
> > I found some discussions within OSM, that it would make sense to offer
> > an OSM editor especially for beginners. To make it easy enough, they
> > should not confuse the beginner with complicated stuff like relations
> > and thus not show and support them. But does that make sense? 
> 
> Not showing (i.e. shielding the user from) relations while secretly 
> handling them might make sense if the editor does a good job.
> 
> It will be much harder to write such an editor than to write an editor 
> which has a relation editor and forces the user to deal with all the 
> problems 
> 
> Not supporting relations is impossible anyway; the API will not allow 
> the deletion of a node that is part of a relation.

In some areas it starts to be impossible to find a node that is not a part of
some relation. The next is not any extreme example. Still it has a lot of
multipolygon relations for buildings, some survaillance camera relations, route
relations combining even route lines and bus stops.

http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=60.16412&lon=24.933511&zoom=18&layers=B000FTF

I suppose most newbies are opening a map for editing somewhere on an urban area
because there most people live and go around. They will see a lot of odd looking
relations. What do they see when they open the wiki page of mapmaking, a natural
place for a newcomer to start
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Map_Making_Overview? Or the next pages:
Editing, Tagging? Nothing about relations. First hit comes through Map features
and link leads to http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Relations. Let's continue
to documentation of Route relation http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Relations

Our wiki has a lot of documentation about recording GPS tracks, sending them on
server and so on. However, the statistics on page
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Stats suggest that this has never been very
popular and the number of people uploading gpx files is actually degreasing. It
may even be that OpenStreetMap project is no longer growing at all if evaluated
by the number of active mappers. Of course it may be just due to seasonal
variation, but anyway I do not believe it is realistic to speak about
logarithmic growth any more. Only thing that seems to grow steadily is the
number of nodes and I guess that to large extent it is due to data imports.

I do not claim that relations are frightening potential new users away. However,
I doubt they are attracting a single one in, and for sure there is something
that has made our growth to stop.

-Jukka Rahkonen-





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