Hi John,
> I'm going to go back to some of the primative concepts of OSM here,
> just to make sure that everyone is on the same page...
>
> OSM has 2 completly destict concepts, tracks and ways: (I am
> simplifying here, but you get the idea)
>
> Tracks are a collection of gps points, as they are recorded, generally
> 1 per second, but there is a huge deal of variety here. it's slightly
> more complicated than that, some people filter them, some people split
> diferent journeys or date periods into separate tracks, but it's
> basicaly that simple.
>
> Ways are (in this context) a road -- with just enough points along it
> to mark the curvature, lots of metadata, and it's always just one
> road, it will never span a bunch of roads describing a route.
Totally aware of thi sdistinction. We are actually generating ways from
our tracks before trying to send them to the public OSM server
> The trouble here is that there is no link between tracks and ways --
> asside from the fact that they are close to each other. This is for
> very important technical reasons. in general once a road has been
> traversed several times, and it is clear that the GPS data is good,
> somone will trace over the (say) 200 gps points that make up the road,
> by adding a way containing (say) 4 nodes. From that point on, there is
> no connection.
>
> It is very destructive simply convert traces directly into ways,
> because it takes up huge amounts of valuable space in the database,
> and leads to a lack of user filtering of bad data. Simply driving past
> a large metalic building can thorugh GPS off by a significant distance
> etc.
99.9% of the tracks/ways we are producing are in or close to forrests.
We have already written code that reduces tracks with 80 records down
to a track of only 20 records. And I as a database engineer are totally
aware of the storage issue. It really looks that we won't even use the
reduced track for creating a way but ask our users to do the click,
click, click,... ting to manually enter a way with as few nodes as
possible with the track being shown inthe background on the map he is
clicking on.
So we can assume high quality ways mit as few nodes as possible on our
site. It's just that I need to keep our users within our ERP system. I
cannot ask tem to log into OSM and use JOSM to edit tracks. That won't
fly! :-(
> I have personally looked into ways of doing exactly what (I think) you
> are trying to do, and found that computers just arn't clever enough to
> match the data up, and produce good ways from traces.
>
> That's not to say that we either don't want, or can't use your data.
> what I would sugest is the following:
>
> You upload data you have as traces, I believe this can be done fairly
> simply using the API (i've done it, using CURL, and got it to work)
> this returns, I blieve an id that should be useful to you.
>
> You could add the metadata that you have about road staes and single
> nodes to the main map data, also farily simple thoguht the API.
>
Still checking out the API described on
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/API_v0.6
Thanks,
Andreas
_______________________________________________
dev mailing list
dev@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
