I am still reading some old mailing list posts ...
What about a relation with type="data", which is a relation that can
include tags and other relations recusively?
This relation has no geometric reference but it is just there to save
data. So we could reuse relations for a purpose which is not the main
OSM one - instead of expensively defining a new data type. This type
could be used to save tag definitions (
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Machine-readable_Map_Feature_list )
regularly in the database to be able to access the data with the API
easily, which already provides versioning and changesets:
<relation id="...">
<tag k="type" v="data" />
<tag k="class" v="tag-def" />
<tag k="key" v="name" />
<tag k="onway" v="true" />
<tag k="description:de" v="..." />
<tag k="display-name:de" v="..." />
<member type="relation" id="..." role="implies" />
...
</relation>
Having a client-side framework with UI to access and change the data
according to the model - a pendant to JOSM - makes sense.
I want to add this idea to proposed uses of relations in the wiki.
Andi
Am 19.02.09 23:35, schrieb Frederik Ramm:
Hi,
Steve Hill wrote:
I've been thinking about ways to improve the way objects are tagged in OSM
- for a long time I've seen some problems with the way we currently tag
things, and I finally got around to writing down some of my thoughts on
the subject.
I *had* been wondering; we had the usual recurring left-right tagging
discussion but the bi-monthly Absolutely New And Improved Tagging Scheme
was overdue for a while. Thanks for jumping in and helping us out ;-)
Your concept is utterly unworkable of course with the current software
landscape, but if we leave that aside for a moment, then you do have an
interesting point, in fact one that was raised by Jochen and myself in
our April 2007 data model paper[1], back when we were still young and
believed we could change the world.
Quoting from that paper:
"Instead of having a geometric object with some properties, we instead
think of objects with some properties (like “this is a museum” and “this
has the name Natural History Museum”) and the added property of “this
object is positioned at such and such a location”. ... So the geometry
is not the object itself, as it is now, but it is just one property of
some kind of abstract object."
I believe this is indeed the way many pros are doing it - there is an
object and the geometry is one of many properties of the object. It is a
concept to keep in mind for the more distant future; I don't think we
should aim to do it with the current implementation of relations though.
Bye
Frederik
[1]http://www.remote.org/frederik/tmp/towards-a-new-data-model-for-osm.pdf
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