[josm-dev] Dealing with conflicts

[Paul Hartmann]

On 01/24/2013 09:17 AM, Paul Norman wrote:
> 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.

Yes, saving a conflict to file is not supported so far. What you can do 
is keep two files, open both and merge the data layers. This will create 
conflicts if both files have objects with the same id, but different 
properties.

Paul