[OSM-talk] Id stability

[Claus Stadler]

Hi,

Thank you for your response.

 >> I believe Richard F has made comments in the past that we shouldn't 
do this

Well, I don't know about the discussion yet, maybe you could give me a 
hint for which subject to search for?
I just want to mention, that for Wikipedia there exists an analysis 
about the conceptual (=meaning) stability  their URLs[1]:
 > 90% of Wikipedia URLs are stable identifiers, and a further ~5% 
change in meaning only slightly. (Figure 2)[1]
So I am eager to know what the counter arguments were :)

Anyway, the reason I ask is: if someone did this analysis (and maybe the 
implementation of a tool for persistent ids) for OpenStreetMap as a part 
of his master thesis, would he be doing duplicate work (as maybe there 
are already plans for creating such system)? and if so: where can I find 
related work?

If there are no plans yet, could anyone who is aware of discussions on 
this topic give me some pointers?


Thank you in advance and cheers,
Claus

[1] Hepp et. al, Harvesting Wiki Consensus - Using Wikipedia Entries as 
Ontology Elements, ESWC 2006


On 08/01/2011 03:39 AM, Steve Bennett wrote:
> 3) Why people intentionally destroy ids, and whether there are better
> ways of achieving their goals?
>
> (I seem to recall someone explaining that sometimes objects are
> deleted and recreated in order to discard the change history,
> particularly for large relations.)
>
> It would definitely be valuable to have the identifiers be more
> persistent. I've been linking to some from Wikipedia:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Keefe_Rail_Trail . I believe Richard
> F has made comments in the past that we shouldn't do this, and we
> should have explicit persistent identifiers instead, but there is no
> support for that yet.
>
> Steve