I hope I'm not missing the point here but surely the maps should use a unit convention for each type of measure. Say metric for distance (be it from place to place or contour heights or sea depth) and then the user can choose to render it as they prefer?
Without intimate knowledge of this project and as a new visitor, I guess I had some preconceptions about it. I thought in these days of XML and model-view separation, the map would be merely a tag hierarchy for a geographical taxonomy and just describe the positioning of things in a spherical coordinate space and some meta info about each element (name, classification, type, description, Dublin Core data* )? The rendering or view of that space should be a completely separate process. If that's true, then the distances and all other measures will be expressed inside the notation in a self-consistent way (e.g. metric...) and the user can choose to render them in whichever way they require at the time: colour intensity, miles, multiples of the distance between their ears, whetever they like. Perhaps the default for an application rendering the map should be to convert the units according to the locale settings of the host operating system? The same principle surely would also apply to other aspects of the rendering, such as the icon set for road signs or the fill pattern for orchards or even the projection type (if any) used**. That way, the map could be rendered via some XSLT as a graph or filtered down to an element set of particular interest. Perhaps, the user prefers to store and manipulate vector on the server, and convert it on the fly to their own style of bitmap on the client? Or use VRML instead of SVG or SVG instead of Flash or Flash instead of JPG. etc... Another advantage would be the ability to search a graphical space by not just the pre-canned names but all the available metadata or its derived data. I have the feeling that I'm about to kick off a storm of protest that everything I've described is already in place but just in case it's not, I'm going to post this anyway I look forward to an interesting chat. Flame away, I'm feeling toasty already ;o) Cheers, Greg *http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dublin_Core **http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_projection -- This e-mail address is the one I use for companies who incorrectly presume promoting products to me is a right. Any e-mails sent to this address are aggressively spam checked and most are discarded, unread. If you're one of those companies you'll find customers are more responsive if they've actively opted in to receive specific information - rather than passively opted in or, worse, just spammed. _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk