Hi, Andy Allan wrote: > Should we restrict the maximum number of relations|ways|nodes that can > be *direct* members of a relation? I don't mind cascading relations, > but 39000 direct members of a single relation might casue issues too.
I tend to say yes, limit it in some way. People are starting to get very creative with relations, which I partly like and partly view with skepticism. Relations are meant - at least I thought that's what they were for - to model strong relationships between objects, like: The following buildings together form the university campus, or: you may not turn from this road into that, or: these 53 ways together form the Golden Jubilee walk. These are important uses which relations are needed for. Increasingly, and I believe this is born from unreflected Wikipedia customs being applied here, people make "collections" or "categories" using relations, for example "cycle network North-Rine-Westphalia" containing every cycle route in that part of Germany, or another relation containing every German Autobahn, or one containing all McDonald's restaurants. I fear the day is not far when someone will start neatly categorizing POIs into relations like "UK bakeries", "railway stations in Europe" or other niceties. This does not make sense; retrieving all McDonald's restaurants or all Autobahns in Germany is one OSMXAPI query, it does not require a human- maintained relation (that only makes things harder for newbie contributors). Anything that *can* be modelled without a relation should be modelled without one. If you want to flag all historic dome-roofed railway stations then, at least that would be my recommendation, please simply tag them "building_type=historic;dome-roofed" or something, instead of making a relation to which you add the object. If the only thing that connects two objects is that they have a common property, I'd say a relation is not the way to model that. That being said, I'd say there is merit in connecting all the ways that form a trans-country motorway into one relation, and what with our split-way-mania that may easily amount to a few thousand pieces... Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail [EMAIL PROTECTED] ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
