I am rabidly anti-imperial :-) yet whole-heartedly concur with Abi's
sentiments and approach. OSM is a "folksonomy" and one of the most
important things to me is to lower the bar for folks to enter data
without reading a detailed specification and without having to
perform pre-processing or pre-calculation (that is what a computer is
for). If that makes the database slightly less elegant or processing
slightly more complex, that is a sacrifice worth making.
Mike
Stockholm
At 01:00 PM 1/24/2008, Abigail Brady wrote:
On Jan 24, 2008 11:26 AM, Martijn van Oosterhout
<<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I'm also worried about people using gauges adding 5ft 5in somewhere,
we should at least require decimals.
I've tagged low bridges in Leicester with maxheight=15'0", for
example. That's what the sign on the bridge says, that should be
represented in the database.
We need for the UK to keep imperial measurements in the DB. Now, I
abhor imperial measurements and want to see us completely
metricated, so please don't mistake me for some kind of rabid
anti-metric person. But the signs say things in feet and inches and
that is a fact. This discussion should not be about a bunch of
non-UK people declaring that UK people aren't allowed to use the
unit system the UK (regrettably) uses in the database, but instead
it should be how this can be best done in a way that tools don't get
too confused by.
Please let us have that conversation. The idea of a cron job is
slightly absurd but nontheless is a thought in the right
direction. There are many options. I think defining a very small
set of allowed units and formats thereof, and then sample code in
many languages to convert these to metres/kilograms, might be the solution.
--
Abi
_______________________________________________
talk mailing list
talk@openstreetmap.org
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
