Having been negative, now the opposite... Why stop at ref?
There are lots of places where it would help to group things uniquely rather than by a simple text string. Names are the obvious next one. If we put the names on a separate shared object, you can then tell when they are actually the same street, or whatever, rather than just a coincidence. There are two entirely separate Love Lane in Cambridge, for example, and many High Street all over the place. How do you know they are the same, especially if they don't all interconnect, or conversely they do, but are actually different. Also you could deal with the case of things which have different names rather than the bodges we have at present. For example, where a street has different names on opposites sides which are rare, but do exist. Or where you have a part of a street known by the name of its terrace of houses on one section, but where the street is really continuous. Or a bridge has its own name but the street with a name continues across it. And that's even without starting on different languages. Which then begs the question: why not do all or most of the tags this way? Share tags between multiple objects as a matter of course when those objects collectively represent one thing. And different but overlapping subsets of objects represent different things. Then maybe say if we're doing it this way some of the time, why not do it all of the time, even for single objects, just for consistency. In which case, are relations just in the picture because they happen to provide a crude mechanism for this which already exists? If all tags were done this way might we get to a point where we are representing real world objects as a whole rather than trying to infer it from groups of tags which happen to be similar and are split up purely for convenience of managing other things like bus routes or bridges which run along part of the real object. David On Wed, 11 Nov 2015 at 12:37 David Earl <da...@frankieandshadow.com> wrote: > I can see the attraction of this, but I do always worry about gross lack > of backward compatibility being a huge barrier to adoption. If you have to > scramble to keep up with changes like this whenever they happen, you aren't > going to be keen to be a consumer of OSM data when it's only peripheral to > what you're trying to do. I hear all the arguments about being able to move > forward and so on, but if you can't keep the customers, there's no point. > > Also relations are a massively bigger burden on a consumer. Every time you > get one you've got to do a look up in a potentially HUGE mass of other > data, so it probably has to be done via a database rather than in memory. > Getting the information you need becomes orders of magnitude slower for > every object. > > It also doesn't help that relations appear last in the OSM data, so you > can't even note the relations as you go and then look them up as you see > ways etc. You have to process the lot first and then go back and to the > original task. Again it pretty much mandates a huge database for anything > other than a small area. > > David > >
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