On Mon, Jul 30, 2012, at 23:55, Frederik Ramm wrote: > > No. We only create relations when the ref tag is not sufficient. We > don't recommend that relations be created for roads otherwise, and > anyone doing anything with the data should not expect relations to be > there. >
How would you define "sufficient" then? Is copying same "ref" value to thousands of ways in major national (or even long regional) roads a good use case for "ref"? I think this "freedom of choice" and lack of clear guidelines is an illusion in this case since it creates inconsistency. Someone said earlier that OSM is not a technical project but a "social" one. Well I would agree BUT for the reasons that Petr Morávek describes very well in this thread there needs to be a minimal level of consensus for tagging stemming from technical reasons - like this situation here for major roads. And it is easy to achieve that - recommend that "the target is that we want to have well-maintained relations for major roads in Europe", then motivate people with reporting tools and it works - Poland now is headed for a nicely cleaned up road network because people are trying to get the report "all green" and also are enjoying that they are doing meaningful work by remapping/fixing major roads which as it turned out from reporting were in not-so-good state. I'm not sure why some people get very defensive when someone suggests some basic (and reasonable - I think) guidelines in order to improve the data quality. Of course communities can go on and maintain stuff their way but going for unified approach within EU for example could foster collaboration between countries - like now German people are actively fixing road network in Poland and using the reports. I see this going to the next level when mappers from EU countries start to build relations for Euro routes and look at the data in different countries. How is this bad? The recommendation of using relations in this case is just to kick off the whole thing and define some base line for collaboration - not because I desperately am itching for fixing some technical design problem in OSM. > > A world-wide unified approach is difficult and does not have only > advantages; being forced to use the same approach in Chile and in China > might not be the best way to model reality. And since it only rarely > happens that someone travels from China to Chile using the same software > - maybe a unified approach isn't even required. > World-wide would indeed be hard - but EU (see above) for starters could be interesting, no? Paweł _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
