A sidelong topic to "separate relations."
Volker and I just shared some email about how he uses JOSM automation
to order relation elements, whereas I make some effort to "smarten
them up." This includes getting more, rather than fewer "route is
ordered" messages from JOSM's relation editor's hover text. It also
includes "putting the list into a smaller sized set of well-ordered
sub-routes" as a strategy. (On my part, when I am manually
re-ordering relation elements, especially when the route has branches
and/or loops).
My argument is that "downstream algorithms" (whether by human effort
or software robot) are often going to try to smarten up this route
relation to a single path (or a subset of that, like sorting
algorithms do with subsets of sorted lists).
Fascinating, no? Does "smartening up" a data structure like "closer
to a single path" (or close via many sorted sub-paths) tend towards
coding for the renderer? Or downstream software routing algorithms?
Is there anything wrong with trying to write neat, better-organized
data? If we can, why wouldn't we? (Cost of time/effort, perhaps).
But even if only entities during the "while" can use it, and even if
the relation in the meantime is essentially ephemeral?
Conversations like these help us hone in on a certain truth, or at
least efficiency, yes? In short, shouldn't we try to write neat data
(if it isn't much extra effort)? How can we get a nice "Pow!" for
that buck?
We use shared data, after all. The data I write today get used
tomorrow, even though they might not next week. But they might get
used smartly (with less effort, quicker...) if I invest a bit of
smarts right now. Maybe that is automation (JOSM plug-in, bot, DWG
consensus...) maybe that is a bit of human manual effort where it
might make a difference. Where does it make a difference? OSM can
be a deep place sometimes.
A lot of the conversations here are an attempt at agreement among
structure and tagging. Good for us.
SteveA
California
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