Hi,
On 07/31/2012 09:31 AM, Paweł Paprota wrote:
No. We only create relations when the ref tag is not sufficient. We
don't recommend that relations be created for roads otherwise, and
anyone doing anything with the data should not expect relations to be
there.
How would you define "sufficient" then?
The "ref" tag is sufficient whenever the membership of a way in a road
can be correctly modeled by it.
The "ref" tag is insufficient when a way can be part of several roads at
the same time.
Is copying same "ref" value to
thousands of ways in major national (or even long regional) roads a good
use case for "ref"?
It is an accepted use case, and easier to edit than using relations.
I think this "freedom of choice" and lack of clear
guidelines is an illusion in this case since it creates inconsistency.
Consistency is not a goal in itself. This is often mistakenly assumed by
newcomers to OSM. The magically expect OSM to be the same the world
over, but ...
Someone said earlier that OSM is not a technical project but a "social"
one.
... people are not "consistent" the world over either.
Well I would agree BUT for the reasons that Petr Morávek describes
very well in this thread there needs to be a minimal level of consensus
for tagging stemming from technical reasons - like this situation here
for major roads.
The amount of consensus there "needs" to be is indeed rather small.
And it is easy to achieve that - recommend that "the target is that we
want to have well-maintained relations for major roads in Europe",
We don't.
then
motivate people with reporting tools and it works - Poland now is headed
for a nicely cleaned up road network because people are trying to get
the report "all green" and also are enjoying that they are doing
meaningful work by remapping/fixing major roads which as it turned out
from reporting were in not-so-good state.
I don't know where you get your idea that having a relation for every
major road is "nice" and "cleaned up". Is it possible that you are using
your tool to impose your personal view on a community that doesn't know
any better?
I'm not sure why some people get very defensive when someone suggests
some basic (and reasonable - I think) guidelines in order to improve the
data quality.
I don't know about others, but personally I often see a certain pattern.
Newcomer - usually with an IT background and just a couple months OSM
experience, usually with very little or even no "out in the field"
mapping hours - barges in and tells us how OSM is in a bad shape and
needs to be fixed. Person has not even bothered to think about the whole
picture, person does not even know how relations came to be invented,
how they are used and for what; person believes that on the strength of
their superior intellect and their database modelling fu alone they know
what's good for OSM. Words like "consistency" are often part of the
argument and the importance of "consistency" is never questioned or its
disadvantages understood, and often a very specific use case is
mentioned or seen as the most important (e.g. "to make OSM usable for
routing, the following must be done").
Your show, until now, falls mostly into this pattern (with the exception
that before you decided to fix the data, you had decided to fix
usability, which is also something that we often see). The fact that you
have only been on these lists for four weeks doesn't automatically mean
that you're wrong with everything you say, but if you had a little more
experience then you would see more things for yourself and would require
less talking to.
You need to understand that OSM in Poland is not the same as OSM in
other countries, and does not necessarily have to be. You also need to
understand that OSM data is edited by humans who will make mistakes, and
that OSM tries to attract ever less-technical people to be mappers so
the more complex your data the more likely it is to break.
(The typical newbie response to this is "well then the editors and API
must make sure my data model cannot be broken. And yay, before you know
it you're not only doing usability work and reshaping the data model,
you're also working on three editors and a rails backend.)
Of course communities can go on and maintain stuff their
way but going for unified approach within EU for example could foster
collaboration between countries - like now German people are actively
fixing road network in Poland and using the reports. I see this going to
the next level when mappers from EU countries start to build relations
for Euro routes
This is actually something that I view with scepticism. The route
relations specifically, but also the idea that mappers export their
mapping style elsewhere.
OSM is mostly a project driven by local knowledge. A European mapper has
no business imposing his personal style of relation mapping to countries
he hasn't even been to.
and look at the data in different countries. How is this
bad?
Because countries with many mappers, like Germany, would thereby
overrule smaller communities in other countries. But what works well for
Germany does not necessarily work well for other places.
The recommendation of using relations in this case is just to kick
off the whole thing and define some base line for collaboration
The base line is that relations are an optional extra and not a required
ingredient for roads mapping. Anything you want to "kick off" over and
above that should be strictly in your local community.
Bye
Frederik
--
Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
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