OpenStreetMap
Currently…
- Getting started with JOSM
- Building a relation of campus bike share stations
- Should add all bike share stations first
- How to add one decommissioned station?
- Stations should be nodes or areas? (currently doing areas)
- Adding grass details to Hilton Garden Inn
- Adding grass details to ERQ
Discussion
Comment from Sanderd17 on 6 August 2020 at 10:59
Hello
Welcome to the JOSM users. Be aware that JOSM will not hold your hand when making changes. You can put any data that fits in the OSM model, and even automate a lot (via the selection filters and plugins). But that does bring some danger to it.
On of the dangers is to use too many relations. Relations are easy to make in JOSM, but should not be used to making generic categories of objects.
I see only a few good uses of relations:
These often have a bunch of tags that apply to the complete feature. So repeating that on every member might be wasteful, hence relations are used.
AssociatedStreet relations for addresses are an edge case. It depends on your local administrative situation whether you need more than a streetname to see the correct address. In Belgium we’ve opted not to use those relations. A number, streetname and boundary relation is enough to get the correct address.
Other features should generally be achieved by tagging. In your example, if the campus has an area mapped, it’s quite easy to query the bike sharing stations inside an area. So you don’t need to add them to a relation. If the campus doesn’t have an area, you may tag them with operator=”Campus XYZ” to be able to query them.
In JOSM, finding a relation and selecting its members is about equally hard as hitting CTRL+F and searching for the correct tag. So there’s really no need for a relation here.