[OSM-dev] Inserting OSM data

[Maarten Deen]

On Mon, 22 Mar 2010 15:19:43 +0100, Andreas Höschler
<ahoesch at smartsoft.de> wrote:
> Hi John,
> 
>>> For that we need some kind of TCP-based XML interface so that we could
>>> send a track in some XML format to a TCP socket and get back the IDs
>>> assigned to objects by the public OSM database server. Only that would
>>> allow us the assign the returned IDs to our private database objects
>>> and thus avoid data duplication. Is there such an API (TCP-socket
>>> based)?
>>
>> It's not that simple, because you may need to deal with merging,
>> alternatively you could produce .osm files similar to what JOSM
>> produces and then people can load those files into JOSM and merge or
>> add data to OSM.
> 
> Creating OSM files would be easy for us. But where would we sent them? 
> Simply put them on our webserver and make an announcement on the osm 
> list "hey, we have some osm data to be merged/imported! Have fun!"!?

That's the basic thought. Have a look at the projectpages for the various
Kosovo imports on <http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Category:Kosovo>.
If this gets coordinated with a group of local mappers (in case there
already is data present) then I don't see a big problem.

> The other problem is how do we get to know that one of our ways got 
> imported into the public OSM database and thus assigned an ID so that 
> we can get rid of that way in our private database?

Only by investigating the new data and comparing it to your own data. As
you can see on some of the Kosovo pages, there is a link to a changeset.
This is a collection of all the items that got added/changed. This could be
used to check against your local data.

Regards,
Maarten