[Imports] Bulk Import of Hotels

[Anthony]

On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 7:37 AM, Greg Troxel <gdt at ir.bbn.com> wrote:

> I've been thinking about how to handle maintenance of imports; so far
> osm has tended to import once and then just edit.  My suggestion is to
> put whatever database primary key you use on the node, and to be able to
> look at the node and tell which import was done, which really means the
> internal date or whatever identifier of your database extract.  Then, in
> a year you can generate a new extract and do some sort of diff where you
> find out the nodes that have not changed since the previous import and
> are different in your database, and adjust them.
>

Please don't put information on nodes that is not useful to anyone but
yourself.   If you want to find the nodes that have not changed since the
previous import, you record the node ids and version numbers when you do the
import.

If you put irrelevant information (like "whatever database primary key you
use on the node") on a node, future editors have no idea when they are
supposed to keep that id and when they are supposed to delete it.

If you want a primary key to tie information between your database and the
OSM database, it should be a *natural key* (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_key).  This way, when someone comes
along to edit the node, they know whether their change invalidates the key
or not.
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