[OSM-talk] Id stability

[Claus Stadler]

Hi,

Is anyone aware of
1) any analysis/research about the stability of OSM ids?
2) any tool(s) that attempts to figure out whether
     a) the meaning of an entity (node, way, relation) changed between 
two versions (e.g. using the id of pub and marking it as a cafe).
     b) a new id is the same thing as a deleted one. (e.g. someone 
deletes a batch of things, and later uploads mostly the same things again)

The thing is, that I am working on the LinkedGeoData[1] project, where 
we attempt to bring the OpenStreetMap data into the Semantic Web 
infrastructure, by publishing the data as RDF. Since we are interlinking 
- based on the OSM IDs - with other knowledge bases out there 
(GeoNames[2], DBpedia[3] and FAO[4] so far), it would be good to know 
about what can be expected about when the links will break ;) And also 
what tools there are to counter that.

Essentially I am asking the same question, as someone asked in a forum 
post[5] at the beginning of this year. The answer was, that these things 
do not exist yet. Has this changed in the meantime?

Cheers,
Claus

[1] http://linkedgeodata.org
[2] http://www.geonames.org/
[3] http://dbpedia.org
[4] http://www.fao.org
[5] http://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=10737