Jonathan Harley wrote: >> A bit map would not be a database, but XML, csv, xls, shape files would. >> The interesting distinction may be vector data that is not organized in a >> direct searchable fashion - so, would svg (for example) be a database? >> Hmmmm... >> > Definitely. Searching an SVG or any XML file can be done the same way you > would search a relational table with no index - by accessing each data item > and examining it.
Playing devil's advocate, that sounds very much like a bitmap could also be considered an un-indexed database - it's a table of (x,y,colour) where the colour is derived from OSM data. You could argue we use a system very much like this in OSM itself, querying the oceantiles.dat "database" to make "all water" or "all land" decisions. -dair ___________________________________________________ [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.refnum.com/ _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
