[OSM-talk] full history of a way?

[Ben Laenen]

MP wrote:
> So currently, if I want to know "how was the way drawn in time T", I
> had to get history of the way, then find out which nodes were used by
> the way in time T, then get history from each of the nodes and pick
> appropriate node from the history, given the time. Then combine this
> into output XML which I can view
>
> Is there some automated tool that will do that?

Now, what I really want to see here is something similar, but for relations: 
being able to ask for a certain version of a relation from the history and 
seeing how it looked back then with its members also like they were at that 
time.

If someone edits some roads nowadays and doesn't see that there are route 
relations on the roads you could end up easily with a situation where it's 
virtually impossible to know how the route was going, because ways were moved, 
merged, and deleted, and the list of way ids you get from the history is not 
helping a bit. The only option would then be to search for and contact the 
person who created that route there and hope that he's still active in OSM and 
still has his notes somewhere so he can retag that route. If not, then the 
only option to fix something is to resurvey, and that seems like a waist of 
time given that the information is in the database.

Ben