[OSM-talk] Giving everything a unique ID

[Pieren]

On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 9:19 AM, John Smith <deltafoxtrot256 at gmail.com>wrote:

> On 3 June 2010 16:26, jamesmikedupont at googlemail.com
> <jamesmikedupont at googlemail.com> wrote:
> > Hi,
> > here is a humble suggestion, instead of giving *everything* unique id,
>
> I didn't actually mean everything in that sense, for example the nodes
> on a road don't all need unique IDs nor should they get them, but at
> the same time a single node might need 2 unique IDs, one for the
> building and one for the business occupying the building.
>
>
At the end, you just translate a lat/lon + tag to a number.... when you can
simply request a tag by its lat/lon to an appropriate api.
The unique ID already exists, it's the osm_id. Why should we recreate the
wheel ? But it's true that the ID is not permanent and cannot really be
trusted. URL's in Wikipedia have the same issue. What about trying to
improve the persistence of the ID by using a similar mechanism : when an
editor sees that a node has been replaced by another node or polygon "with
the same meaning (or set of tags)", it could insert a kind of "#REDIRECT"
into the removed object redirecting to the new osm_id

Pieren
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