On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 2:40 PM, William Lachance<[email protected]> wrote:
> I have to say that as someone who uses OSM data in my own projects, I > really don't like the idea of creating our own "OSM-CA" mapping and > tagging conventions. Do we really want to be formatting our OSM data > differently from international conventions? We will be using standard conventions, but there will be extensions that are unique to Canada, or possibly shared with a few other countries. I highly doubt that there will be many ice bridges and winter roads in places like Costa Rica, and Ethiopia. > This basically amounts to > asking everyone who writes tools/products that read/write OSM data > (which go far beyond the OSMARender and Potlatch editor, see for example > the developer tools at http://cloudmade.com) to accomodate us. Well, if you can glean from my writings the concept that I was attempting to communicate, you would understand that the suggestion that I made would work with existing OSM data, as well as with the GeoBase sourced data. The GeoBase data just magnifies the effect because of the much higher degree of way fragmentation. With existing OSM sourced data, if I want to change a tag on a roadway that is made up of 3 segments, due to a bridge in the middle of the roadway, I have to select and change the tag on each of the 3 segments. I am simply suggesting that the editing software be made a little smarter in that it would be able to follow the selected tag information, and allow you to change all the adjoining segments that have the same tag value. This would work very nicely with the existing data, and for the GeoBase sourced data, it would work the same, just that there would be more segments in the data. If I were to take a 200 metre long section of roadway, and define it using "International Conventions" within the OSM structure, it is very possible that I could have a bunch of segments, where perhaps the number of lanes change, the surface type changes, a bridge exists, and just for fun, it becomes a one way street. If each of these segments has a road name associated with it, the renderer can end up placing a bunch of names along that section of street. If however the renderer were instructed to look for all the segments with the same name, and only place a single name on that section until XX distance away, it would make the map look better. When I map a roadway, I tend to make it one long way, from start to finish unless I have to break it to allow me to tag something specific. I have created highways that are hundreds of miles long as a single way from a GPS trace. I have to break them to convert, but then I stitch them back together afterwards. So, when I look at the finished product, there's usually a label somewhere along the length of the way... sometimes a couple as you move along the length of the way. Because GeoBase segments the data much more, we see what I would consider deficiencies in the rendering. My original idea of changing the data to suit the renderer was against the mantra, but I was trying to hide the fact that that was indeed what I wanted to do... James VE6SRV _______________________________________________ Talk-ca mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ca
