[OSM-talk] New API suggestion: Allowing contributors to easily track their OSM-objects over time

[mmd]

On 2020-08-22 19:55, Martin Koppenhoefer wrote:
> What kind of permanent ids do you want? For some more abstract concept like a road with a specific name? A shop? A building? If there’s a way tagged with building=supermarket, shop=supermarket, name=Foo, and you add a permanent id to it. Then the supermarket gets bought by someone else and changes to name=Pango? Or the supermarket closes. Or it gets torn down and rebuilt by the same operator. Or someone detaches the shop tags and adds them to a node inside.
> What happens with the id?

Your comment is spot on. We're discussing technical ideas for something
that isn't even clear on a semantic level.

Somehow this whole discussion reminds me of this blog post [1], in
particular the "Lack of Permanent IDs" section. A "Conceptual Object" as
it is described in that blog post sounds like a great idea, yet it
suffers from the same real world semantic issues that Martin already
pointed out.


[1] https://blog.emacsen.net/blog/2018/02/16/osm-is-in-trouble/