Lester Caine wrote: > I harp back to *MY* original request.
I thought you might. ;) > That there is a mechanism created for > managing hierarchical data properly. You can superimpose a "structure" on OSM two ways: either through forcing the data to be entered and tagged in a certain way, or through post-processing. Imposing it simply via data entry will not work for our community. It requires either strict rules on what data is entered (can't work with a user-base growing at the rate ours is), or for the editing software to provide a greater level of abstraction, and experience shows that many of our users _resent_ abstraction - they want to control exactly what's going into the database. So it has to be via post-processing - and this has the advantage that two people can derive a completely different structure from the same database. And, again, let's work on the libraries to make this as easy as possible. I agree with your later point that it would be good to have a mechanism of finding out what's in each country (and, ultimately, county/département/länd/whatever) - but rather than requiring everyone to tag with some new hierarchical equivalent of is_in, let's use the boundaries that people are already drawing to set up a "painted" image of the world, coastline-style, with a lookup service. Would be a great GSoC project sometime... next year! cheers Richard _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
