[openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website] add optional coordinate epoch to nodes (#3203)

[Andy Allan]

There's definitely a problem with the slow drifting of tectonic plates, and more problems involving rectification of imagery, decade-old GPS traces etc. I'm happy to live somewhere with less drift than most places, but even here the positions of mapped features (and GPS traces) are slowly moving away from where they were when they were mapped a few years ago.

So OSM needs some way of dealing with this, whether storing epochs and letting editors + consumers deal with it (could get messy), or dealing with it centrally by nudging everything around every now and then (also could get messy).

I think it's clear that whatever approach is used will have big ramifications for a lot of parts of the ecosystem, so it's probably best to prototype this first, to make sure it works without unintended side effects. I should also point out that anything that depends on changing the API is unlikely to happen quickly - I had no end of pushback a few years ago on this topic, and I'm not surprised to see more pushback here too.

This specific proposal is that the API should allow an optional epoch attribute, but otherwise do nothing with it. Editors and consumers would be free to ignore or update it as they see fit. So my counter-proposal would be to use an epoch tag on the nodes, instead of an epoch attribute. This way you can prototype different approaches, test it out in various editors, and it's much more likely to make it through all of the standard processing chains as @mmd-osm describes. When there's widespread adoption (of whichever approach) and agreement across the community, it can, if necessary, be standardised as an attribute in a future API version.

Is there anything I'm missing that would prevent you moving forward using a tag instead of an attribute? Or any other drawbacks that I'm not considering?

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