Frederik Ramm wrote: > I assume it will usually be easier to check a machine-readable > relation than to compare tags. A grouping relation is a more > abstract thing and can be used for other purposes (i.e. many ways > might together make up the "city bypass", but this might not depend > on the road "ref" but on the road name). I assume that anyone > working with the data in earnest will have to support relations > anyway, so it seems unnecessary to ask them to also group by tags > which involves finding out which tags to group by, which bounding > box so search in, splitting tag values at semicolons etc.
IMO it's _always_ better to optimise for ease of editing and maintenance, than for ease of use by developers. Any non-trivial use of OSM data is going to require postprocessing anyway. One of our failures, as a project, is that we don't provide enough widely used/actively developed libraries in common languages for working with OSM data - libraries that would do exactly what you suggest (grouping by tags, etc.). Much better to work on these than to raise the (already too high) editing barriers for new mappers. > My original point "why not get used to it now" is perhaps the more > important one; we're still very much at the beginning concerning > relations and the more people get exposed to relations, the better > we'll be able to work with them and use them productively. You could start by making JOSM's relations UI as good as Potlatch's. <grins, ducks and runs> cheers Richard _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
