On 23 Dec 2014 04:19:49 -0000, Russ Nelson wrote: > Hi. I'm editing the Hudson River all as one entity, from its beginning > in the Adirondacks to its end at NYC. Along the way, there are some > islands that need to be excluded, so it's not just riverbank, > riverbank, riverank. It's riverbank, multipolygon(riverbank, island, > island), riverbank. > > In theory at least, I could make the whole riverbank into one > multipolygon, with a bunch of outers (about 50) and inners (about > 200). Would that create a problem for other editors? To load the whole > thing, you would have to load a LOT of nodes.
That would not only be a problem for other editors but create a relation which is hard to handle, easily to break and sooner or later /will/ be broken more or less accidental by someone. See also http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Relation#Size > Or, conversely, should I keep it as about 20 plain ways and 30 > multipolygons? But what kind of a relation do I make for the entire > riverbank? >[…] > Should this "Hudson Riverbank" relation be flat or hierarchical? In the early beginnings I also used to put all stuff for one river in one relation – only to rip it apart later after gathering enough knowledge. Though there is a relation type waterway¹ I think it and all the work some people put in it superfluous – even more with the not really documented watershed relation² which mappers want to show a whole watershed… See also: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Relations/Relations_are_not_Categories When you have a highway split into several parts because of varying surface, maxspeed, sidewalk values etc you usually don't create a relation with the name of the highway. The same logic you can apply for rivers and watersheds. When all the parts of the riverbanks have riverbank=* and name=* on them it is an easy task to query for them, e.g. with http://overpass-turbo.eu Regarding watershed relations (although you didn't ask for them): Martin Kompf managed to make a map of all waterways of Central Europe showing the watersheds – without having relations everywhere: http://www.kompf.de/gps/rivermap.html tl;dr regarding your question > Should this "Hudson Riverbank" relation be flat or hierarchical? If you still think you need a relation for all Hudson River, don't make it a flat one – this would be the worst choice. hth Thomas ¹ http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Types_of_relation ² http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Relation:watershed _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
