[OSM-dev] [OSM-legal-talk] OSM IDs as foreign keys (was: ODbL "virality" questions)

[Andy Allan]

On Tue, Oct 6, 2009 at 12:21 PM, John Smith <deltafoxtrot256 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/10/6 Andy Allan <gravitystorm at gmail.com>:
>> Any time I discuss this, I always refer to Wikitravel Press. Now that
>> I've put the video online, everyone who wasn't at SOTM08 can also see
>> what Jani had to say on this topic. See http://vimeo.com/6847540 , and
>> (if you want to lose all context) skip to 6:00. For those of you who
>> don't want to watch the video or can't, they use the name and
>> approximate location to match things like restaurants and hotels
>> between wikitravel and OSM. There's no OSM information in wikitravel
>> or wikitravel links in OSM.
>
> I understand how this may work for buildings and other POIs and it
> seems like a really good solution to the problem.
>
> What I'm trying to figure out is how this would apply to things like
> long stretches of highways?

Ah, you might want to have a look at OpenLR - a recently proposed
standard for ensuring that two map providers are referring to the same
stretch of road whilst having separate geodatabases. Primarily aimed
at exchanging traffic data between satnav providers it solves the same
problem we're talking about here - you could refer to roads in
openstreetmap without needing to know their osmid, and it's robust
against moving things around a bit and/or splitting, merging etc. I'll
hold off saying it definitely is the answer since currently it works
in theory but I haven't yet seen it working in practise!

Cheers,
Andy