This relates to the thread "Tag desired for "maintenance"" which begins at http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tagging/2011-November/008887.html .
My gut feeling is that it is more beneficial to bring civic services into the fold in using OSM as a micro-mapping resource than it is to reflect maintenance status in the map itself. As a for instance, I'll relate what I have tried to do several times for street light outages in my neighborhood. There is an online form for reporting street light outages in my area. The positional information requested is along the lines of intersection / cross-street. What I have provided with my reports is a cross-reference via URL to an OSM object which is the street light which required maintenance. I have no idea whether the maintenance organization actually used this info or not. What I would like to see rather than reflection of maintenance status in OSM would be a true integration of open311 or other legacy systems with OSM so that the involved object (be it a streetlight or a hydrant, a footway or a bridge) could be unambiguously geo-located via an OSM reference. One could include maintenance status in a tag on the object, but the key use case for OSM data would remain unambiguous geo-location. The main problem I have with transients in OSM data is that their updating to reflect current state (e.g. change from impaired to repaired) is dependent upon a volunteer observation and a volunteer OSM data revision. In my opinion, the availability of volunteer resource is not consistent with the requirements for real-time condition monitoring required for maintaining true values for the proposed maintenance tag. Regards - OSM user ceyockey _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
