[OSM-talk] Enabling communities to use OSM as a planning tool

[Andy Robinson (blackadder-lists)]

Donald Allwright
>Sent: 04 June 2008 9:56 AM
>To: talk at openstreetmap.org
>Subject: Re: [OSM-talk] Enabling communities to use OSM as a planning tool
>
>
>One thought that occurs to me is that there will be many, disparate groups
>wishing to use OSM to plan stuff, only a very small proportion of which
>would eventually become reality. I'm not sure if it would be appropriate to
>add these features to the main OSM database.
>
>Perhaps what would be more useful would be the possibility for people to
>have their own 'supplementary' database which they use to store their own
>data - which they could then tag in whatever way they wish, without
>affecting the main OSM database. How easy would it be to make this
>possible? So for example, people's custom renderers will pull data from
>OSM, followed by the custom database(s) and then render accordingly. I
>suspect this would be fairly easy to implement as only the data extraction
>stage should be affected. If we make it trivially easy for people to add
>this capability then OSM becomes generically much more useful, without
>becoming cluttered with data that might turn out to go nowhere.

It's a valid point and we could look at extensions to the project in the
future that would scratch the itch. The problem is that I want to get on and
do something now so clearly I have to see if I can work with what we have.
My feeling is that if ways/nodes are appropriately tagged than anyone can
come along and delete the irrelevant stuff at any time in the time honoured
wiki way.

Cheers

Andy