I have made quite some progress in preparing the import of the German TMC Location-Codes that was allowed to us by the BASt. Now I would like to present what we may get into the map in a few month.
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/TMC/TMC_Import_Germany We are talking about: 28.520 points 1.699 segments 2.889 roads 16.966 intersections 6.135 administrative areas 932 other areas spanning all of the german road-network. Some of these roads, areas and points may not yet exist in OSM. There are no tools to do this import yet. There will need to be due to the excessive topology-checing required and that this import of Germany may just be the first of some dozen other complete countries that use TMC and thus the same exchange-format for their LocationCodeLists. (No "today germany, tomorrow he world"-jokes please. Actually Italy was the first to publish their LCL publicly without highly restrictive licensing.) There is one tool linked in the wiki that can convert the segments and points (not yet ways, areas and intersections) into an osm-map for visualisation and manual checking of yet to write import-tools. == understanding TMC== I managed to write a small TMC-parser and look at quite a selection of messages. A proof of concept to use the tagging- schema below in an actual working navigator with TMC-support if slowly taking shape. (As the result of the import is to be computer readable, I believe it should be proven that it can be read and used in the intended way before starting to add elements the map that may prove inadequate.) I managed to get a good understanding of how locations are referenced in the TMC-system and the given tagging-schema with its location-codes, forward- and backward-references looks adequate to the task. The challange may still be that the topology of the very simplistic tmc-road-network has to be mapped to our much more detailed osm-network and thus to a more refined topology. (e.g. dual-carriageways and motorway-juctions are just a simple line or point in tmc but a tmc-message mentioning an affected direction may only affect one half of our dual-cardiageway.) == tagging schema === I prepared a tagging-schema that I would very much like feedback on as it does not yet look very "pretty". (Please use the Talk-Page) Due to the fact that there are multiple countries with their own Location-List and that some countries have more then one operator and that a Tag can only have one value there was a decision to make. For TMC:Roads the best way to tag them was relations as they are only ordered lists of TMC:Segments. But for TMC:Points=OSM:Nodes and TMC:Segments=OSM:Ways there where 2 options: 1: use a relation with only one member and simple tags like tmc:country tmc:table tmc:locationcode or 2:tag the element itself but use more complex keys to allow the same element to be referenced from multiple locationcodes. I opted for the second as it is easier to understand, work with and faster to obtain the referenced objects. (Points and Segments are usually referenced by TMC-messages. Roads and Areas more seldomly.) I tried to avoid characters like "(" or "[" and stayed with ":" and "_" instread, to avoid special-characters that need encoding. Marcus _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk