On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 03:19:36PM +0100, Stephen Gower wrote:
On Wed, Apr 11, 2012 at 12:42:44PM +0100, Janet McKnight wrote:
BTW, do you think the openguide is just duplicating OSM? Be honest! :-}
No! I, personally, am not convinced that OSM should have all the metadata on shops/restaurants that it does, but I think that horse has flown the nest. In any case, OSM shouldn't contain the free-text description and photos/etc that Openguides do.
On reflection, and eventually coming back on subject, what OSM does well is record precise, verifiable, facts. Position, opening hours, name, etc etc. OpenGuides can record that too, to a certain extent, but what it does uniquely is record the subjective stuff (like child-friendly for example) and rely on the wikinature to keep consensus.
If you want to find all central restaurants in OSM, than you define a "central" polygon and then do a PostGIS (spatial PostgreSQL) query to select all restaurant points (and shapes) within it. What Openguides does is crowd-source the definition of central, by letting people apply it to whatever nodes they think are central. To find a definition of central from Openguides, you select all the nodes that are tagged with the central locale (and if you like, draw a polygon around them).
Of course, this is all theoretical, and doesn't deal well with the situation where one person want to tag the station as central, and another doesn't. Human nature vs wikinature, or something.
s