2008/10/5 Ed Loach <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > 30mph. If we had stayed with assumed country-specific units then the tagging > would have been more consistent, easier for the user to tag, and not require > a conversion to a random number of decimal places.
I'm not a fan of the options that include suffixes or other tricks to imply units. That said, even that approach is better than using country-specific units, because it's a huge burden on applications to work out what country a restriction falls within (twofold, since the border data is often imprecise too). Consider the Irish border, which is also an imperial/metric border. Yuck! A further drawback with the approach is the assumption that units stay uniform within a particular country. But in the UK, it's getting common for height restrictions to be stated in dual units. So for transitional cases like that, the country-specific model breaks down. I'm with Shaun on the namespacing thing. Allowing fields like maxspeed to contain normalised, pure numeric data is beneficial for fast data extraction, and the namespaced approach allows for automatic updating of the "real|" numeric field. Dermot -- -------------------------------------- Iren sind menschlich _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
