[OSM-dev] Structured error messages from API

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Ian Dees wrote:
> Yea, I suppose that requires some discussion. The idea arose from a 
> meeting I recently attended with some US city government GIS people that 
> have expressed interest in maintaining (at least part of) their official 
> GIS database in OpenStreetMap. Their number one fear/concern is an OSM 
> editor changing the "official" boundary of a state forest, pulling that 
> change back to do cartography for a hunting season (for example), and 
> then having a land owner call them up asking why people are hunting on 
> their land.

The proper way to deal with this is to make it easier for OSM-related 
tools to access third party databases, then tell the gov't guys to 
maintain their data in such a "certified OSM compatible third party 
database". Anything that goes into OSM must be changeable by OSM 
mappers. We're not a hosting service for 3rd party data ,-)

> The second part of that suggestion probably should be a separate line: 
> locked tags is slang for "a way to maintain a globally unique ID" for a 
> certain map feature. They want to be able to pull their data back out of 
> OSM based on certain keys, and when I pointed out that anyone could add 
> or remove the tags they apply to their data, they suggested that we 
> maintain a UUID for every map feature.

I agree that some method of "permalinking" would benefit many. Today we 
have people explicitly linking to relation IDs which is not very 
helpful. It will be difficult to make such permalinks unbreakable 
without restricting editors but worth a thought.

Bye
Frederik