This is surely going to spur controversy, but here I go. Imagine a world in which a new mapper opens its (newly-discovered) favourite editor and is presented with the following message the first time they edit anything:
"You can map using points and relations. Relations are groups of things with specific roles: groups of points make lines, groups of lines can make things like routes bus routes, city boundaries, hollow buildings, turn restrictions, etc., groups of routes can make route networks. Mappers rarely group further, but they could. Because lines are very common, you can draw them by simply adding many points one after another. If you want to make more complex relations such as routes and boundaries, check out the relation editor." Of course, such an editor would have to be designed with that philosophy in mind from the start. Is this a rant? Not really, this a sincere impression I've had for a very long time. Many novice users are confused by relations because they need to build their understanding later, often when someone complains they've made some mistake. When this notion of "grouping" is presented at the very beginning, I believe people will easily understand it for all of the advanced scenarios (the most common being routes and boundaries). It would just be didactic. Some people have even proposed abolishing the "way" entity from OSM's API and replacing it with a relation "type=way" with "node" members. Some logic (such as checking for empty ways/empty relations and checking membership across different entities) would be simplified, which would be good for database maintenance. It would also be good for app development, apps would have to understand relations from the very start and would thus be encouraged to support advanced features. That would be very little extra development overhead compared to just points and lines. I understand that very big relations with lots of nodes and a single role for all of them would be undesirable. Apps like the editor can still make the "way" entity transparent to the user, so an API change is not really required for a change in editor/mapper mindset. Still, I raise this aspect because, in an abstract sense that mappers do need to develop, ways are simply a "type of relation", and they could be concretely so. Relations cannot be abolished (there is no other way to represent bus/car/hiking/boat routes, or hollow polygons). Ways, in theory, can. -- Fernando Trebien +55 (51) 9962-5409 "Nullius in verba." _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
