On Sat, 2012-12-01 at 09:24 -0500, Greg Troxel wrote: > The problem with representing catchment areas in OSM is that it rapidly > gets into the "one database, one man's treasure, another's junk" > problem, because it leads to objects for things that don't really exist, > but are only enshrined in policies of various kinds.
These things that don't exist, are still really important. Consider for instance a map without international borders, turn restrictions on roads, and probably some more... > I can see the point that in mapping a developing country for health > care, these boundaries might be very important to map users and editors > relative to other data. But if I think about the area around me, there > are probably 5 places that will deliver food, and adding 5 polygons to > the map for that already seems unreasonable. My city friends probably > have hundreds of places that will deliver. In a large city, most food places will probably deliver to certain already mapped areas, hence you only need to add the tag pointing to a pre-existing object, not create 5 polygons. You also don't have to have this tag on all services with catchment areas, it can just be used when useful. > Also, it seems that catchment area is a marketing term, and the concepts > of > > "to where will we deliver, rather than refusing the order" > "from what areas (of home address) will we treat patients" > "from what areas do we consider ourself to be the hospital of record" > > are all very different questions. It may be that what's needed for is a > more traditional GIS analysis showing distance to facilities from > everywhere. I have little knowledge about GIS, but it seems to me like the above questions all involve the same data, the Catchment Area of the service. When writing the proposal, I was trying to think about the definition of catchment area on Wikipedia [1] > I suspect the real discusion will be about adding polygons to be targets > of this tag, rather than the tag itself. I might not have understood your point here, but I imagine most of the catchment areas will be best mapped as multipolygon relations at least in high density areas, hence not cluttering up current editors. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catchment_area_%28human_geography%29 _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
