[OSM-talk] Converting buildings from nodes to ways

[Alan Mintz]

At 2010-12-23 04:10, Laurence Penney wrote:
>I've been 'exploding' several building nodes into ways, based on splendid 
>Bing imagery for Bristol.

It is nice, isn't it? I've been lucky enough to have 25/30cm imagery from 
USGS in most of my area, but this 6cm stuff is awesome. And cheers to the 
implementation for JOSM - it's incredibly fast and agile. Truly an 
important step for OSM.


>  I'm getting concerned about data loss, the fact that any external 
> database accumulating information on such vulnerable nodes, e.g. [1], 
> will only with difficulty and guesswork be able to match it to the way 
> that replaced it.

I favor using the existing node as part of the new way, then removing the 
tags from it. This preserves its history. However, I don't believe people 
should ever count on OSM IDs to be at all permanent - they aren't designed 
to be. There was a long discussion a while ago about using GUIDs for that 
if necessary.

--
Alan Mintz <Alan_Mintz+OSM at Earthlink.net>