[OSM-dev] Working with OSM data with less or no metadata

[Jochen Topf]

On Wed, Feb 14, 2018 at 05:17:09PM +0100, Roland Olbricht wrote:
> > - timestamps however cannot only potentially be used in lieu of
> > changeset ids to group contributions, the information itself is
> > problematic because it allows to profile contributions over time
> 
> Timestamps are necessary to correctly figure out which nodes have belonged
> to a certain version of a way, and similarly for ways and nodes belonging to
> relations.

Just want to hilight this. Timestamps are not optional when working with
history data, without them it isn't possible to figure out which object
of a specific versions refers to other specific object versions. This is
a result of objects refering to other objects by id only and not by (id,
version) pair.

So when working with non-history (ie only current data), you don't need
any metadata at all (to correctly interpret the geodata). But when
working with history data, you need both, version and timestamp.

Jochen
-- 
Jochen Topf  jochen at remote.org  https://www.jochentopf.com/  +49-351-31778688