On Sun, Aug 21, 2011 at 9:23 AM, Stefan Keller <[email protected]> wrote: > 2011/8/21 Frederik Ramm <[email protected]>: >> Hi, >> >> Stefan Keller wrote: >>> >>> What about storing the object ID (and the link properties) directly in >>> the OSM object? >> >> Wasn't the idea of *not* polluting the OSM database with external reference >> data at the very core of Jaak's proposal? > > "Polluting" sounds to me a little undifferentiated. Maintaining such a > tag would support simplicity - and that's (another) core design > principle.
Requiring OSM mappers to maintain links to external databases doesn't seem like a good idea. It's hard enough keeping OSM up to date with what's actually in existence on the ground. Adding a requirement to keep up to date with a potentially limitless number of external databases would make things too difficult. If you want to use OSM for this, I don't think anyone's going to stop you. But the vast majority of people aren't going to help you, either. What's almost surely going to happen is that the information is going to rot. It's not going to be kept up to date. When people delete and recreate elements to handle some sort of problem they're not going to copy the links (and/or they'll copy them incorrectly in some way you didn't expect them to). Ways will get split and merged and split and merged over again, and the links are going to wind up pointing to things that you never intended them to point to. Take a look at TIGER TLIDs if you want a preview. _______________________________________________ dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
