[OSM-talk] Tagging the source

Martin Koppenhoefer dieterdreist at gmail.com
Fri Sep 28 14:27:50 BST 2012


2012/9/28 Pieren <pieren3 at gmail.com>:
> The tag 'source' on elements:
> Pros:
> - support multiple sources during edit session
> - attribution present in planet, extracts
> - can be modified at any time
> - retrieve one element history is easy (one API call)
> Cons:
> - size in database
> - works fine only for small edit sessions (or imports)


there are other cons to source tags on objects:
when does the original contribution faint? This is a very difficult
question and every mapper who wants to improve an object which has a
source-tag gets the burden to care about. He might act wrong if he
doesn't retain the previous attribution (because he would be
obfuscating the source) and he might also act wrong if he keeps it
(because he would attribute an object to a source from which there is
probably few if anything left).

This makes pretty clear IMHO that source tags (in a project like osm,
where no data is "stable") clearly don't belong to object, but to the
changes which create and modify those objects.

cheers,
Martin



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