Hey all, Sorry about being mainly uninformed about tagging culture and the OSM Way in general - I've been working with the data and the toolset but absent on the mailing lists.
So, I came up with an idea for a cool project that would contribute to OSM in a pretty simple, neat way. One would have a quick webapp that could be accessed on an iPhone/Android and would use geolocation to figure a users location as well as possible, and then present a plain list of building names around the user and the choice of how many stories the building had. There would be no map on the mobile - no weird augmented-reality thing or whatever - just the user would be able to see 'Frank's Coffee' from where they're standing, and click on the button for 1, 2, 3, or 'enter a number' stories (floors) the building has. The feedback loop would be a neat map of a single city at a time rendered with Mapnik's BuildingSymbolizer, which supports variable feature heights. This was neat, but then I realized that what I'd like to present to users (Mid City Cafe) is actually a point, rather than the way, which is "1626 14th St NW" at best. Thus one would have to do some kind of weird point-in-polygon math in order to present a list of options, and then the data being tagged would be a point with a number of stories - something that seems weird to me. So the question is, after this long-winded nonsense: are the identities of buildings always going to be separate from the buildings themselves in OSM parlance? Is this a regional thing, or is it just with semi-sparse DC data that I'm testing with? Are other people doing point-in-polygon math to do what I'd like to do (having buildings represent places rather than material brick and mortar)? Or is there a different way to pull this off that I'm missing and trying to force the technology to bend the wrong way? Thanks OSM gurus! All knowledge appreciated. Tom MacWright _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
