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Where a road is made up of several separate ways, can the same name be entered for each way or will the Db 'think' that there are a number of roads with the same name?

asked 20 Dec '10, 17:02

gumpa's gravatar image

gumpa
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The "DB" is pretty dumb, it doesn't really concern itself with this. It's up to the interpreter of the data (map renderers, GIS software etc.) to understand that it is a single road, split into several segments.

You could of course use a relation to mark all these segments as belonging to a single road, but that is usually an overkill for common features like roads.

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answered 20 Dec '10, 17:23

Breki's gravatar image

Breki
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accept rate: 10%

As pointed out by Breki, the DB itself does not care, because it will not interpret the data.

However, the general consensus is that yes, if a single street needs to consist of several ways (e.g. because parts are tagged differently), then that is no problem. As a matter of fact, many, many longer streets in the OSM database have more than one way. Software using OSM will generally understand that it's really just one street, as long as you make sure that you

  1. tag all ways with exactly the same name (pay attention to spelling, expand abbreviations)
  2. ways making up the street are connected to each other

Most OSM editors will help you with this, by providing a way to copy all tags from one point/way to another, and by making it easy to connect ways.

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answered 07 Mar '11, 00:54

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sleske
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accept rate: 24%

edited 08 Mar '11, 17:55

Baloo%20Uriza's gravatar image

Baloo Uriza
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question asked: 20 Dec '10, 17:02

question was seen: 7,641 times

last updated: 08 Mar '11, 17:55

NOTICE: help.openstreetmap.org is no longer in use from 1st March 2024. Please use the OpenStreetMap Community Forum