Hello,

I have a question regarding the amount of nodes that one may use to draw
a road, and whether the amount of nodes used has a considerable effect
on the speed of the OpenStreetMap.

I did my first edits to OSM a few days ago. I'll get a GPS device soon,
but so far my only edits have been adding street names and making roads
more accurate by adding more nodes to curves, etc. Following these
edits, another person who has edited the same area earlier, contacted me
and told me not to add unnecessary nodes to roads that he has made long
time ago and added that he has already removed the unnecessary nodes.
According to him using many nodes slows down the rendering and routing.

This made me wonder, what really is the right amount of nodes to use,
when one want's the curves to be right and look really nice, but not to
cause any problems by this. Can nodes be added as long as there are
visible jaggies on the rendered map - even small ones - and just leave
out the ones which have no affect on rendering (like nodes on a straight
street)? It would be also good to know, if the speed of rendering and
routing is a factor that should be concidered? I see now that in a few
places I added some unnecessary nodes - for example I should have moved
existing ones instead of adding new ones. Or perhaps I just looked at
those curves too long - with full zoom - and those jaggies grew up in my
mind to something bigger than they were :-) On the other hand, in many
places I think that I made good changes and not many nodes should have
been removed.

I searched for information on this matter around the OSM web site and
mailing lists, and found this page (see the section "Accuracy":
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Editing_Standards_and_Conventions
I would seem to me that my edits were relatively close to the example
given there.

I took some screenshots of the changes in question, so that people would
get a better picture of what I'm talking about. I took screenshots of
four different places that I edited, and three different versions of
each of them. The version one shows the situation before my edits, the
second one after my edits, and the third one after the removal of nodes
by the original editor. The screenshots are here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/sets/72157604611934407/
(note that for some reason Flickr shows the pictures in a reverse
alphabetical order). The zoomlevel used in the images is 16.

It would be nice to get comments from people who know more about what's
involved.


Regards,

Ari Torhamo


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