[OSM-dev] Duplicate IDs

Eugene Alvin Villar seav80 at gmail.com
Sun Aug 19 22:18:02 BST 2012


On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 3:38 AM, Jochen Topf <jochen at remote.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 19, 2012 at 09:25:45PM +0200, Lukas Kabrt wrote:
>> I have created a small library for parsing OSM data and one of the
>> users reported a weird error. The root cause of this error is the fact
>> that there are elements with duplicate IDs in the database. I have
>> found at least this pair -
>> http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/49755010 and
>> http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/node/49755010
>>
>> Before I start fixing this error, it would be nice to know whether
>> this is an exceptional case or whether these kind of integrity
>> violations happens more often.
>>
>> Has anyone seen other elements with duplicate IDs? What is the best
>> way to fix it in the database?
>
> OSM has three types of objects: nodes, ways, and relations. And they all
> have their own number space.

While this seems common knowledge to longtime OSM people, is this
documented in the wiki? I looked at the following pages and nothing
indicates that nodes, ways, relations, and changesets all have their
own ID number space:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Elements
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/API_v0.6

Is there another page stating this? It's possible that someone
relatively new to OSM might commit the same mistake of assuming that
all elements of any type have unique IDs.



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