Hi, Chris Browet wrote:
I am wondering (I wonder a lot lately ;-)) if some have already given a thought to the fact that nodes actually represent 2 different concepts
Yes, this is something that has been discussed on and off for at least two years. I know because we mentioned in the first edition of our OSM book ;)
Of course the "node" element would have to be kept not only for POI nodes but also for topology nodes (where two ways meet).
Having geometries in ways would be much more traditional-GIS-like and would simplify many things. However your suggestion mixes in-way geometry with geometry by reference to nodes; and it has to because otherwise you lose topology. But this means you don't get the full advantages of either.
A big potential problem I see is promoting and demoting nodes - you select and tag a "point" in a way, thereby creating a node; you later remove the tag from the node, thereby deleting a node. You let a road and a forest boundary share geometries, thereby creating proper nodes for each shared coordinate; you split them apart, deleting the nodes and creating two sets of points-in-ways.
I see the basic idea but it all seems a but uneven to me, even ugly to implement.
Most of the positive aspects for the consumer could probably be achieved by producing a kind of augmented planet file and diff, where internally you still have nodes and ways as ever, but all <nd> objects are extended with a lat and lon attribute. If the node is untagged it will not be present in the nodes section of the file; if it is tagged it will be present.
This would be API version independent. Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail [email protected] ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
