[OSM-dev] Chopped of ways. New flag for OSM XML?

Karl Newman siliconfiend at gmail.com
Thu Aug 14 05:55:36 BST 2008


On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 8:34 PM, Brett Henderson <brett at bretth.com> wrote:

> Jochen Topf wrote:
> > Hi!
> >
> > When creating excerpts of OSM data with Osmosis, Osmosis will (depending
> > on flags) chop of ways, i.e. the output will contain ways with only some
> > of the nodes in the way. But looking at the XML there is no way to tell
> > that this has happened. The way still has the same ID and timestamp.
> > There should be a way of recognizing theses chopped of ways, say by
> > adding an incomplete="true" attribute or something.
> >
> > This question came up on the German mailing list after somebody had used
> > the excerpt as basis for some automated fixing of data. He (IMHO
> correctly)
> > checked the Osmosis excerpt with current data from the API by comparing
> > the timestamps which were the same. So he assumed nothing had changed
> > and he could safely edit the data. But because of the excerpt process
> > the data he based his decision on, was not correct.
> >
> > This is part of a larger problem. Say you create an extract with only
> > some of the tags or a relation with only some members.
> >
> > Jochen
> >
> I made a mistake making way truncation the default behaviour.  I intend
> to fix this but feel free to raise a defect in TRAC.
>

Even still, it's a valid concern and there are other operations (i.e.,
cutting into tiles or tag transforms) that can manipulate the data into a
form that probably shouldn't be uploaded.

Karl
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