On 29/10/2015 21:52, Colin Smale wrote:
I don't have any examples to counter your statement. But I am assuming
you are referring to the use of a spatial database.  It is IMHO a high
barrier to entry. Are we to expect users to have that kind of
infrastructure and skills at their disposal? What about mkgmap and the
many other consumers which simply work with a snapshot in PBF or XML and
need to be able to do the right thing with the data with lets say a dual
core and 8GB.

Indeed. It's very possible to "do the right thing" by running spatial queries on the data, without a spatial database, working directly on a PBF snapshot, and running lightning fast in just a few GB of memory and on a desktop-class machine.

I can confirm this because I've done exactly that, in a tool which I'm delighted to see is proving popular: https://github.com/systemed/tilemaker, and in particular, https://github.com/systemed/tilemaker/blob/master/CONFIGURATION.md#lua-spatial-queries .

That aside, even if you accept that the interests of the data consumer are paramount - which, as a data consumer, I don't, and I'm rather tired of tagfiddlers without development knowledge second-guessing what developers might need - the number of consumers to whom it's important to differentiate (say) UK and French no entry signs is an 0.001% edge case, not one worthy of defining the entire tagging model.

You could just as well argue that you're penalising the little guy by preventing him from searching simply for "traffic_sign=no_entry" and making him search either for 193 country-specific values, or run one full-text query. Given your concern about doing things "very cheaply", I'm pretty sure more people have a spatial index on OSM data than have a full-text index.

But let's remind ourselves of Mateusz's original posting:

I recently started tagging traffic signs and I am surprised by wide
usage country-specific traffic sign codes.

I think that at least common signs may be tagged by human-readable
values.

Quite.

Richard

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