On 30 July 2010 22:12, Alan Mintz <alan_mintz+...@earthlink.net> wrote: > Do we really need > the database space that badly?
I've heard arguments on the talk list that this clutters the database and similarly wikipedia= tags should be massively removed and if at all, links should be maintained then in the wikipedia database *to* our objects rather in our database to wikipedia pages. This just sounds like passing on the hot potato. Even if osm comes to be a point where references to ten different databases are kept for objects, it's still valuable information, and I personally don't see how it's inconvenient. If it hurts your eyes how the name= and highway= tags are lost among the other tags in your favourite editor, then perhaps modify the editor. Keep the links in whatever database it makes most sense, for example wikipedia pages are indexed by their title, which is a pretty stable reference, as opposed to OSM id's, that's why it make more sense to keep them here. TIGER data we can't edit, that's why it makes more sense to keep the id's here. Flickr (if treated as a big database where each photo is a record) had the balls to store references to osm objects, as well as dopplr.com IDs and foursquare.com venue IDs in their "machine tags" for each picture that is a photograph of a given object. There was no fear of "cluttering" their machine tags space. Why would it be an issue in osm? Also note that once there's a photo on flickr that is tagged with an osm object id and a foursquare.com venue id at the same time, you have a link between OSM and foursquare.com, no need to duplicate this information in either of these databases. If that osm object contains a tiger tlid, you can tie the foursquare.com venue to a tiger record and so on. I'm not asking anyone to go adding these tags, but just saying that they don't hurt, even if they're just a hint (a bridge that contains twenty TLIDs and perhaps only one of them is the right one). Cheers _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
