Hi, On 02/01/11 03:37, Steve Bennett wrote:
Furthermore, you might be reduced to categorising individual elements of the factory. Would the administrative wing really be landuse=industrial? Surely it should be landuse=commercial. etc etc.
Before long you'll be tagging the restrooms as landuse=wastewater_facility or something.
I don't think there's any single answer that can give the right information to every consumer. Sometimes OSM has to make actual choices between different uses of the data.
Well the goal certainly is being totally consumer agnostic - "We map what's on the ground, and you decide how you want to use that."
It is true that we sometimes do make choices that make things easier for a common use and may cause problems for a less common use (for example: we usually map streets as lines even though, on the ground, they are areas). But this is not a final decision, but rather a compromise for the time being - with tools and software as they are, mapping all roads as areas would be too difficult for most people at this time. This does not mean it will remain so forever; indeed I am pretty sure that sooner or later we *will* have the actual surface area for all roads in our database.
In my eyes, the goal is always to come as close to reality as possible, but this is tempered by the current state of tool quality, database and data model performance, community aptitude etc.; so what you see in OSM right now is the current compromise between what is feasible and what is desired. This compromise is not a decision or a choice that has been made; it is floating.
Bye Frederik _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
