[OSM-talk] Tagging OSM objects with UUIDs

[Peter Körner]

John Smith schrieb:
 > Currently I've been making a proposal for OSM to adopt an UUID tagging
 > scheme so that third parties wishing to directly refer to OSM objects
 > can do so without the current problems of using internal database
 > reference IDs vanishing in future.
I don't think that your uuid-tags will be more stable either - they are 
subject to thousands of editors that will sometimes delete tags they 
don't know or that won't take over those tags to the ways when they 
create polys for them.

About explicit editor support: I disapprove proposals that won't work 
without explicit editor support (eg. because they are too complex to 
handle in a manual fashion).

 > So far I've been toying with some proof of concept stuff to establish
 > what works and what doesn't, so far I've coded some scripts to
 > generate and upload UUIDs automatically on OSM objects
Doing sth. automatically in osm is always a bad idea, especially if the 
thing you're trying to do is still in a proposal state -- so please do 
not run it agaianst the main api as long as it's not approved by a 
wide-enough audience.

I like Tim's Query-to-map [1] which accomplishes this task already and 
doesn't rely on any extra tagging, by combining bbox+[ref|name] -- tags 
that don't vanish as fast as some mysterious uuid tag.

Peter


[1] <http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Query-to-map>