Ok, another go at solving this, I've been talking to h4ck3rm1k3 about this problem some what and we think we might have a workable solution.
Firstly we need to build a suitable lookup table, currently far from complete it will need to have some default method for things like county highway shields in the US regardless if the state and county specifically hasn't been added to the lookup table. I've used LGA instead of county for the lookup table, LGA = Local Government Area, which is counties or shires or councils or ...., what ever comes below states, I couldn't think of a better term to use than state, I realise these are called provinces etc. The other problem is ways crossing LGA, state or country borders, I'm not sure how mapnik etc handles this, but the ways may need to be split to prevent shields from leaking across those borders. I have a basic lookup table on the wiki, I think it should be possible for pre-processing software to download this information and use it to apply shields. The ways table in the mapnik DB will need an extra custom column, eg shield and from there it's just a matter of finding out what country polygon encloses the way and working out if the network=* needs more precise information like state and LGA polygon the way is contained in. The initial country lookup is to prevent reuse of network=* tags of the same name for different things in different countries. Then all we need is some logic to apply the shield "name" from the lookup table to the database after any changesets have been applied to the database and bobs your uncle we should now have a scalable solution. I hope :) _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
