I apologize for not reading every post in the original thread, but too many other things to do :(
The real point here is combining micro mapping with macro mapping transparently. There are many people who will argue that once you have a 'way', it can be tagged to define its 'area', but this misses the main point. At the top level we need a tree of 'objects'. Top one would be 'earth' ( allowing introduction of 'moon' and 'mars' at some point in the future ;) ). And then everything fits below that, and must fit within an area. Once one gets down to finer detail such as school, hospital and the like, there is little option but to provide an area. Roads and other linear features are no different to these other area features, and may even fit inside some larger area. Service roads around a hospital for instance. So in the same way that we have single nodes for a hospital, along with a more detailed map of the same object, we should have an agreed way of handling the same detail for a road. Relations are something of a bodge to provide some of the missing information for a 'tree' view, but one should be able to select 'M6' and see the whole of the M6 ... as a single line on the map of England ... and on zoming in as a detailed area encompassing the verges and other 'nogo' areas including accurate details of each lane. I am NOT saying that everybody needs to provide ALL this detailed information, but I am arguing that if the information is available - such as from satellite images then there needs to be a standard way of adding it, along with functionality amongst the tools to deal with the micro mapping details. The bottom line is that while adding 'width' tags all the way along a road may be a practical half way house, other area features are not handled the same way so why should roads be any different. Macro details like number of lanes, and which one to use to take a safe path on and off a complex road interchange neeh to be handled as tags on the linear feature for routing purposes, but the ability to draw a road in the same detail as a golf course is a no brainer? Higher level views can then pull out nodes for hospital, golf course and road grid .... while higher zoom levels can how acurate fine detail? -- Lester Caine - G8HFL ----------------------------- Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/ Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk// Firebird - http://www.firebirdsql.org/index.php _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
