[Talk-GB] Footpath reference numbers

[Nick Whitelegg]

I think some discussion of this has come up before (some time ago) but how many people are tagging footpaths with their council reference numbers?

Reason I ask is that I'm in the process of overhauling Freemap and one thing I'd like to do is allow people to tag footpaths with (perhaps subjective) comments which would be out of place in the main OSM database, such as whether it has a nice view, whether there are any problems with the path, etc.

I do this already to some extent but the only problem is that the comments are linked to the path's OSM ID. Obviously if the path is split, or deleted and redrawn, the OSM ID then becomes invalidated so it's tricky to ensure that comments remain associated with the correct footpath.

However council footpath reference numbers can uniquely identify a footpath, so obviously if comments were linked to ref numbers the problem would be much simplified.

I know one or two people have been tagging ref numbers but where have they got the info from? A couple of councils round here (Hants, West Sussex) publish the path numbers on their online maps but it's unclear whether copying from them would be infringement of copyright.

If anyone has been extensively tagging paths with ref numbers let me know where as it would be a good "test bed" for the system.

Thanks,
Nick