[OSM-talk] Tagging OSM objects with UUIDs

John Smith deltafoxtrot256 at gmail.com
Tue Jun 8 04:01:41 BST 2010


On 8 June 2010 12:55, Anthony <osm at inbox.org> wrote:
> Fair enough.  So the description is optional.

If someone needed to add a description can't they just use the note=*
tag? Which then makes it a display issue.

One purpose of unique IDs is to inter-link databases, while it's nice
to know which databases are linking to OSM objects, it shouldn't be
mandatory, just like we shouldn't have to add comments for every
aspect of why we tagged something in some particular way.

Paul from Freebase has already indicated they were/are planning to
dump Freebase IDs into the OSM DB to make their life easier*, however
if every 3rd party site did this we'd end up with an unmanageable list
of unique IDs against OSM objects and in that situation I can pretty
much guarantee that these most likely won't be maintained properly, or
simply bulk reverted/deleted as they shouldn't be in the OSM DB.

On the other hand if we provide people the means of being able to link
to OSM objects without them all dumping their own keys in our database
things are much more likely to turn out better for everyone.

* http://lists.freebase.com/pipermail/freebase-discuss/2010-June/001847.html




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