[OSM-talk] Tagging OSM objects with UUIDs

[Lester Caine]

John Smith wrote:
> On 7 June 2010 19:19, Peter Körner<osm-lists at mazdermind.de>  wrote:
>> But as you already said, you're not the first one with this idea and just
>> adding another id-tag doesn't make anything better. So please, let's first
>> check if this is *really* a good solution instead of just playing the
>> "my-id-is-better-than-yours"-game over again.
>
> I'm not saying my idea is perfect, which is why I put it on the wiki as a
> proposal, but I'm trying things out to see if they'll work, otherwise we're
> just assuming that they're all going to fail so we may as not try and address
> the issue.

Internally generated id numbers are used to currently identify things. As long 
as those numbers do not change then they can be used to provide permanent links 
to anything in the database. The problem - I think - is that these internal 
numbers are attached to a POI of some sort which may benefit from being able to 
identify different facets of that point of interest? You either add separate 
poi's for the 'building' and the 'occupant' and the like so that you get 
different internal id's ... or we agree on a way of uniquely tagging information 
in a manor that does not rely on the internal sub structure?

XML is too flexible to rely on identifying distinct objects when taken in
isolation from their deeper context, so some overall unique identifier has a
place? UUID is an well designed unique id that suits the bill so why not use it.
Trying to 'create' a new type of unique ID would be pointless?

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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