On Thu, Jul 19, 2018 at 7:22 AM Peter Elderson <pelder...@gmail.com> wrote: > The goal of the idea is to tag the date of the last reality check. The best > thing I have now is the date of the last edit, which most of the time results > from e.g. a mapper's action (cut or remove) on a way that's part of the route > relation. > > I want to ensure that the route in the field and the route relation stay in > sync, and when they don't (which is a 100% certainty) that you can tell at > what point in time it did match. > > Information older than that date (e.g. gpx-tracks) can be discarded, newer > information can be entered, and edits after the survey date are new info > which should be kept.
Keeping the field survey up to date is a laudable goal, and I've no objection to some sort of tagging that reports "this geometry was field surveyed on <date>." Making it fit with the data model will be challenging; it's not something that can be easily automated, given the variety of mappers' workflows.In the current world, to make something like this a reality you have to have an individual or organization that becomes the de facto 'owner' of the route and keeps track of its own surveys - and that isn't very OSMish. I think this could be worked around with sufficient cleverness. But please, please, don't discard data older than a certain date. OSM is a very young project as geography goes. While out-of-date data can be misleading, the right thing to do is to inform, not to delete, particularly in cases where the out-of-date information is the only information that is available. It may also be the only information that can guide in recovering from an act of vandalism or a badly-considered import. Perhaps I'm coming at this from the 'wrong' perspective. since a fair amount of my mapping is of features that nobody has yet seen fit to map at all, or that were once imported from external data that I consider hallucinatory. If someone with a GPS found a route passable a decade ago, that's a piece of information that I now have that I wouldn't have had otherwise. It could be that the route is no longer passable, has been relocated, or has been demolished, but without the old data, what reason do I have even to go and find out? Moreover, the land remembers. I've been on trips where abandoned tracks and the grades of dismantled railroads, a century old and now grown to trees, have been important landmarks. I have no qualms about not showing them on a general-purpose map, but to an off-trail hiker, they are waymarks for eyes to see that can. The right thing to do with 'stale' data - perhaps even 'proven incorrect' data - is to inform, not to discard. _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging