[OSM-talk] Proposal superseded_by tag for ID stabilisation

[Steve Bennett]

On Thu, Aug 4, 2011 at 4:36 AM, Gregor Horvath <gregor at ediwo.com> wrote:
> ** re-mapping of stuff in the course of the license change
>   - re-structuring of relations
>   - 0.7 area data type (lots of existing areas get a new ID)
>
>   superseded_by tag

That's an interesting use case - let's say A describes a certain
building, and is deleted (the author didn't agree to CTs), and then B
describes the same building. You want to be careful about linking B to
A, lets B be considered a derivative work...

In general I think there's some value in what you're describing here,
not just for id stability, but in better understanding the history and
provenance of objects, which helps with attributing authorship. Some
sort of more generic meta-tagging scheme might be good (superseded_by
could easily be interpreted as referring to the actual physical
objects, not the OSM objects), so maybe something like osm:new_id=xxx,
osm:merge_into=xxx etc.

Steve