[OSM-talk] Improving ref=* documentation

François Lacombe fl.infosreseaux at gmail.com
Wed Aug 4 21:51:25 UTC 2021


Hi and thanks everyone for those inputs.

Le mer. 4 août 2021 à 23:12, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> a écrit :

> Hi,
>
> I think an important addition is that OSM never makes up ref values.
> They must already exist, and must be assigned by someone else, and this
> assignment must be verifiable.
>

I agree with you.

I'll rephrase my complicated statement to better reflect your point.
"OSM community doesn't build its own reference strategies but get inspired
by many existing schemes to make its data link-able to third parties
databases."

Le mer. 4 août 2021 à 23:38, Brian M. Sperlongano <zelonewolf at gmail.com> a
écrit :

> If the sign on the ground doesn't match the government's database, then
> the obvious answer is that the government database is wrong.  I don't see
> why we would replicate demonstrably wrong data into OSM.
>

That's not so simple. Signage can be locally relevant and the database
nationally consolidated (for instance).
See this chapter:
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:Fanfouer/References#Country_specific_references

And, in French, the examples given here
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/FR:Key:ref:FR:gdo

When we read "P0002" in a given city, it means 85236P0002 in the database
(completed with city number).
Here the ground is incomplete and the database is unique nationally.

That's why we sometimes need the ground ref (for verifiability) and the
consolidated ref for database linkage.
It's more complex than just right or wrong.

All the best

François
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20210804/202cf440/attachment.htm>


More information about the talk mailing list