On Thursday 21 May 2009, Guenther Meyer wrote: > > relations are one of only three basic structures in OSM (node - way > > - relation), can we please assume that someone mapping with OSM can > > grasp three concepts? He already should be able to deal with them > > now anyway. > > they are, but at least for me relations really add some kind of > complexity. yes, some things aren't possible with the other > structures, but using relations as an answer for everything is not a > good way...
I'm not proposing it for everything, I'm only proposing it for something where other structures have obvious setbacks. But from some reason using relations for something else than routes is immediately regarded as some obfuscated mapping method. > you have to get the whole relation, just to check, if some streets > are part of it. size does matter here... > with the tag-on-street approach you only need the street, nothing > more. The exact same argument would apply to store routes as tags on ways from now on. But that has its limitations, so we handle them with relations now. So this is another area where tags on ways are insufficient, so use relations instead. And it's an API limitation, which tries to handle relations just like ways. Relations are so different from ways that it just needs another method, yet for some reason that's not seen by the people creating the API. It's should be a method where each node, way or relation tells which relation it belongs to (without the need to download all member id's from that relation), and then there should be upload functions that just tell "add/delete node, way or relation X as member of relation Y". Ben _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
