[Imports] Dealing with conflicts

[Paul Norman]

I'm working on software which to be used with importing addresses. I expect
to be able to identify cases where OSM data and remote data source data
conflict. Obviously automatically overwriting OSM data with the remote
source is a no-go, but the quality of the remote source is good enough I
don't want to drop these conflicts, but be able to present them some way in
an editor.

My first thought was JOSM's conflict resolution mechanism. To figure out the
XML format, I went to JOSM, created a conflict and tried to save. JOSM won't
let you save with a conflict and the wiki docs have nothing about conflicts
in the file format, so I'm presuming that it can't be done.

My only other idea was to create a JOSM file that will create conflicts when
the objects in it are updated. I am not sure if this is possible in all
cases and it seems like a bad way to do it. 

Is anyone aware of a better way to handle this?

The properties that may conflict between the two sources are tagging and in
the case of a feature represented by node, its position. The case of two
conflicting way geometries is beyond the scope of what I am doing.