[OSM-talk] Id stability

[straup]

For what it's worth we were aware that IDs were technically considered 
unstable when we started down the OSM machine tags "extras" road, at Flickr.

It seemed like a reasonable potential gotcha given that most of the IDs 
are stable most of the time and the risks were outweighed by the 
benefits of making OSM data and Flickr photos hold hands.

Personally, I would prefer permanent identifiers but back in 2009 we 
were just trying to explore what could be done modulo all the edge cases 
that exist in any project.

Cheers,

On 7/31/11 7:52 PM, Toby Murray wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 31, 2011 at 8:39 PM, Steve Bennett<stevagewp at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> 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.
>
> Flickr does this too, by the way:
> http://code.flickr.com/blog/2009/09/28/thats-maybe-a-bit-too-dorky-even-for-us/
>
> Until we come up with a better way of persisting IDs, people WILL use
> node/way/relation IDs to link to OSM data. When I expand a POI to an
> area I generally try to use the original node as part of the new
> closed way to maintain some kind of link but that's not a solution and
> would still break . And as far as I know, no real work has been done
> on this. I think it would take an API change and good editor support
> to implement correctly.
>
> Toby
>
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