[OSM-talk] capitols

[Ben Laenen]

On Wednesday 13 June 2007, Sebastian Spaeth wrote:
> so what do you do if there happens to be a municipality of texas and
> a galactical imperium called texas? this is way too ambigious,
>
> spaetz

As I mentioned in another discussion some weeks earlier: in a good 
database one uses ids/primary keys to save those values, this ambiguity 
is just here because we insist on having the real names in there. And I 
hope the database for OSM will be changed once to have id's there.

After all, there are only good things about using id's: the ambiguity 
would be gone, the database will always be consistent (would someone 
tag a street in Brussels as "is_in=Brussel" or "is_in=Bruxelles", Dutch 
and French are both official languages), and it even saves a lot of 
space, just think of the amount of space needed for tagging each street 
with a complete string instead of just a number.

Sure, it would need a special editor to find those id numbers, and 
present the numbers as readible strings to the users, but just think of 
the horror that would happen if cities of complete countries would 
change names (it happened enough in the last years), I doubt someone 
would want to change every "is_in" tag referencing it, while it should 
be sufficient to just change one place name only. And the special 
editor has also the benefit that one could use for example the English 
variants of the names to find the id's, instead of having to be able to 
read (or worse: type) Arabic, Greek, Cyrillic, Devanagari or whatever 
the local script may be when you're on holiday and want to do some OSM 
work.

Greetings
Ben