On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 01:23:32PM +0100, Steve Hill wrote: > On Thu, 24 Apr 2008, Christopher Schmidt wrote: > > >I can't claim to have the right answer, but I will state that it is not > >common in geographic software to have namespaced attributes: in general, > >when this is the case, it is a namespace based only on the object type > >which has a specific schema. (In this case, that would be something like > >pisteLift, since the dataset would be a list of pisteLifts.) > > But in common software, do the objects have an explicit type? In > OpenStreetMap they do not - the type is determined by a bunch of arbitrary > tags, for which you need background knowledge of which tags define the > object type and which just define attributes (e.g. there is no unified > "type" tag which you know will always define what the object is).
In general, yes, objects are put into a specific database table or some such because they have a specific type with a known set of tags. This isn't really much different than well-curated OSM data, which typically makes it entirely possible to do this using hueristics. It almost sounds like the proposal is to use namespaces in place of a 'type' property on the object... which I personally think would be a better way to go than to namespace every tag... Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt MetaCarta _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
