Maybe some words about how the whole house number stuff in Karlsruhe came about, will help understand, what we had in mind:
We looked at the different proposals and saw that there was a difficult problem that had gotten stuck. Many ideas, but no progress. But it needed to be addressed, because addresses are so important for routing and other uses of the data. So we organized a one-day workshop in Karlsruhe with a few people with the specific goal of getting one step forward on this problem. Not to solve all problems (that would have taken more than a day), but to identify what we could do, to get the thing unstuck. Some of us collected some data in the days before so that we had samples. We were looking for a solution that would * allow Joe Average Mapper to contribute data, so it needed to be conceptually simple * would work in Germany (bonus for solutions that work in other places, too) * not require huge amounts of new software to be written (because then we would have been stuck again, because nobody had time to write it) * make common cases easy and complex cases possible * be robust in the face of common operations like splitting ways We were explicitly NOT looking for a solution that would solve the problem for the whole world/for everybody/for all times. Look at the OASIS xAL standard (http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/ciq/ciq.html#6) if you want to see the monster such as solution would require. We looked at the proposals in the Wiki and had some ideas of our own. They all failed on one or more of the above points. After discussing the whole thing for a few hours we developed the solution that is now known as Karlsruhe schema. It has many drawbacks, but it is reasonably good on those points listed above. Unlike the other proposals it can actually be used today, there was some sample data and a rendering. Thats why it was picked up. I am a computer science person myself and from a data modelling perspective I cringe when I see what we have produced, but we can not deny that it works (at least sort-of). We do not think of this as the end of the discussion, but as one step in the discussion. The Karlsruhe schema (and addressing in OSM in general) still has two huge hurdles in front of it: a) when and how will mappers actually contribute data in larger quantities (there are not even 5000 house numbers in the whole of Europe mapped currently). b) how can this data be used in real applications. There certainly is a lot of work to be done. At the workshop in Karlsruhe we actually created a piece of software that could search for theses addresses, but it was so clumsy and hard to set up that it didn't live beyond the workshop day. And as some critics pointed out there is some complex programming to do, before the data can be used for routing or other things. I hope this has shed some light on the Karlsruhe schema. I invite everybody to work on the Karlsruhe schema to improve it, to collect data and to create software for it. Or, if you prefer, to work on other schemes, collect data and create software. Once we have some experience with the different options, it will be easier to see, which one works best. Jochen -- Jochen Topf [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.remote.org/jochen/ +49-721-388298 _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
