[talk-au] History (Was: Re: [OpenStreetMap] Re: Hume and Hovell route)

[Steve Bennett]

On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 7:50 PM, Andrew Harvey <andrew.harvey4 at gmail.com> wrote:
> The first is you have a feature which was there, but now isn't. i.e.
> there was a building, but then it was demolished. What I've done in the
> past is tagged (either the object or changeset) as being historical then
> deleting it, so at least you can track it down later.
>
> The second is a current feature that only had some attributes changed.
> ie. the road was 2 lane, but then became 3 lane. When you update the
> lanes tag to 3, at the moment you can't indicate that this change was
> due to a mapping error, or the number of lanes really changed. Nor can
> you record the dates/times of the changeover.

Yeah, the difference between the world changing and simply our
representation of the world changing. Some people stick a tag like
"deletion_reason=building demolished" on there first.

No question about it, the fourth dimension introduces a lot of
complexities. Sadly, I don't have a lot of faith in the OSM community
to come up with a sensible strategy for dealing with all the nuances.
(There's a very strong tendency for people to quickly decide on some
tags that solve their immediate problem, and not worry much about how
those tags work for other people.)

Steve