I actually don’t know if this is a commonly agreed policy in Sweden or not.
Probably not agreed as such. Agreed by whom, and when? But it certainly makes sense in a technical aspect to not connect the various “layers” of data that do not share the same context.
There can be many examples here:
- Roads can intersect landcover without sharing nodes (a road moving from within to without a forest do not need to touch the forest polygon)
- Power lines can intersect almost anything that isn’t
power
. - Buildings do not need to touch road networks or landcover unless it makes sense to use them as a border or end point of them. Same with
power
where a power line can end on a building. It makes sense to connect them when they interact. - It is usually not necessary to apply
layer=1
to power lines. The separation is implicit. - Cases can be made for how a waterway is used as an administrative boundary. Yes, it can be good if the waterway IS the boundary - but when you want to improve the detail of the waterway you usually need to separate them in order to get the correct geometry for the waterway.
In short, my point is that intersections and connections should only exist when there is a logical connection.
However, as we all know, in the editor iD, connecting adjacent features is heavily promoted by the way the editor works. Everything wants to snap together and I know from experience that in the view of an iD user it makes much more sense to map everything connected - because it’s almost impossible to try to map a farmland next to a road. Much more convenient to snap them together and map them as one combined way.
In JOSM it is both easier and better to map things apart.
So. Before this post is too long, I think that iD users have a valid excuse for doing things “wrong”. The software promotes it. Awareness of this from both iD- and JOSM users goes a long way, especially from the iD users’ side in understanding the limitations of that editor - and making sure not to create data in an undesirable way. Especially not on a large scale.
I feel like I’m about to pass (extrajudicial) judgment here, but I’ll say it anyway
@BertMule, please avoid using misaligned Bing Aerial photos, and try to avoid snapping things together.
@archie, please avoid creating conflicts while he is working by immediately editing in the same area.