[OSM-talk] 'Allowed data'

[Lester Caine]

Russ Nelson wrote:
>   > Which is exactly why the 'start_date' and 'end_date' become
>   > important elements. Rather than simply wiping those historic layers
>   > they get an end date, and the editors simply ignore them unless one
>   > has enabled a date range. This then replaces simply deleting
>   > perfectly good data and instead hides it away properly. The
>   > original proposal was that this data would get moved off to OHM,
>   > but that simply does not work when the bulk of the surrounding data
>   > is still required from the OSM version.
>
> Yeah, OHM doesn't work, not when railbeds get reused as hiking trails,
> as some of the Dunderberg railbeds have been, and when the trail gets
> rerouted onto railbed, as the R-D trail has been. I was looking for
> railbed off the trail, and found old Red Dot blazes instead.

As a simple starting point, it is a fact that much of current history is being 
mapped and then destroyed! I have been adding roundabouts and new housing 
developments which involve 'moving' roads that already exist and renaming them. 
In these instances we have the historic versions already recorded ... just no 
means of tagging the older versions with the real facts? Some people have no 
interest in even adding buildings to the data, but as a first step I'm talking 
about simply retaining the data that we are NOW gathering. I don't think it's 
unreasonable to guess that 99.9% of that data only needs a start date to then be 
a complete historic record? YES a small percentage of material is a lot more 
complex, and developments get started, and evolve beyond what was originally 
planned, or abandoned. That material may well be a candidate for OHM? Yes once 
one digs deeper into the life of an object there is a lot more history each 
element of which needs start and stop dates, and my own 'day job' involves that 
fine detail, where essentially every 'tag' has a created, start & end date. In a 
hundred years time the current view of OSM will be history, both because data 
has yet to be recorded, but also because that data has evolved, and it is simply 
recording that evolution correctly which needs to start now. There are people 
who will want to add the history going backwards, and that is just another 
aspect, but it only requires that the mechanisms are in place to correctly 
manage the data going forward? The existing data is already an historic record 
if only we could get at it easier?

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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