Cyclic relationships - talk-ch

1 Nov 2022


      Hi all
While writing some program that works with OSM relations, I found cycles in
the containment graph. For example, relation/2913585
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/2913585 is part of
relation/12762833 https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/12762833, which
is again part of the same relation where we started. If a naive
implementation were to traverse this relationship graph, it would run into
an infinite loop. This isn’t a serious problem though; checking for cycles
is easy enough. But it seems like a particularly interesting type of
tagging mistake, so I thought why not share the fun with you.
In Switzerland, there’s currently three such cycles:
relation/2913585 https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/2913585 ⟶
{relation/12762833, relation/12762834} ⟶  relation/2913585
relation/4012524 https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/4012524 ⟶
{relation/12762831, relation/12762832} ⟶  relation/4012524
relation/9202820 https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/9202820 ⟶
 relation/13987412 ⟶  relation/9202820
Best,
— Sascha