On Mon, 7 Apr 2008, Frederik Ramm wrote:
> I assume it will usually be easier to check a machine-readable relation than
> to compare tags.
Possibly. There may be cause for having machine generated relations which
are kept up to date by the server when data is committed so the people
editing the data don't need to care about them (such relations would need
to be read-only and tagged in a way to make it clear they aren't normal
editable relations). I think that'd be easier for people submitting the
data than having to deal with these relations directly (which as you say,
are only there for efficency reasons)
In the end, moving *all* tags into relations might be the best thing to
do, but I think the editors need a lot of work before that is a viable
option. At the moment we have a rather confusing mix.
> it seems unnecessary to ask them to also group by tags which
> involves finding out which tags to group by, which bounding box so search in,
> splitting tag values at semicolons etc.
Unless you can ensure that the relations exist on *all* appropriate
objects, they will have to group by tags anyway. (And I don't believe you
can ensure this without some automatic daemon fixing up the relations on
all the data as it is submitted).
> Rather than have one million systems implement their own ways of guessing
> what was meant, I'd like to put this explicitly in the database (or at least
> have *one* central system do the grouping consinstently).
This sounds sensible. But as mentioned, I think for it to be achieveable
we either need a lot of improvement on the editors to make relations more
obvious and intuitive, or we need some automatic stuff to generate the
relations that can be unambiguously derived from other data. (Or both)
I'm concerned that the data structure might be outpacing the editors too
much and this could be raising the bar to entry for mappers.
> But this discussion is becoming much too theoretical.
Well yeah, but sometimes it's good to bash theoretical ideas around to see
what works. :)
- Steve
xmpp:[EMAIL PROTECTED] sip:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.nexusuk.org/
Servatis a periculum, servatis a maleficum - Whisper, Evanescence
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