2013/12/12 Andrew Guertin <andrew.guer...@uvm.edu> > Many villages or other small human settlements have no clearly defined > boundaries, and we just represent them as a node. >
IMHO big human settlements are more difficult than small ones when it comes to define their edges. You can represent (from a data model point of view) every place as an area in OSM, nodes are a somehow preliminary solution (and good to indicate a central point which might often not be the geometrical center). > Similarly, many objects (say, shops) DO have clearly defined boundaries, > but only have a node in OSM. In both cases, it's understood that the thing > is an area, and the node means "it's somewhere around here". > shops can also be represented by areas (see above, preliminary), and a lot of people already do it (see http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/shop ) > > Those are common examples of nodes representing fuzzy objects, and I see > no reason that a way couldn't also be fuzzy. Just as with nodes, it would > be up to the consumer to either understand the level of fuzziness, ignore > the feature entirely, or pass it through and let a human interpret it. > a node isn't a nice representation of a geographical region, as it doesn't convey information about topology (region inside region, boundaries between regions etc.). cheers, Martin
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