On Thu, Jun 3, 2010 at 2:26 AM, jamesmikedup...@googlemail.com < jamesmikedup...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> Hi, > here is a humble suggestion, instead of giving *everything* unique id, > we might focus on making some form of permalink that is usable upon > request. Like for wikipedia articles etc, that we can link to and be > relatively sure that the link will still be there. Some form of watch > tool that would inform the user that the permalink he created is > broken. > It would be easier to maintain a list of "don't break me" links than > to rework the whole system. > mike > Okay, here's a plan. I took some of the detail from http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/UUID but adapted it a bit: *From the URL for any node/way/relation (or lat/lon pair) one can click on a button "make permanent link". *The node/way/relation gets tagged with uuid=*, where * is generated using an algorithm expected to create a universally unique id (I'll let someone more expert determine how, but I was thinking some sort of hash on the xml of the feature itself plus the time). If a lat/lon pair is created then a new node is created with that uuid. *A wiki page is set up where http://domain/wiki/UUID has text, links, and a slippy map. The slippy map highlights the element which has the UUID. The text is meant to be brief - only enough to uniquely identify the "thing" (perhaps the description text could even be duplicated in a uuid_description tag). Links would be used for the actual interesting data about the "thing". *If more than one element points to the same UUID, this is an error - use a relation if you want to do this. *Mappers are encouraged to check http://domain/wiki/UUID before deleting or repurposing nodes/ways/relations. *A bot goes through regularly checking for additions, deletions, drastic changes, duplicate UUIDs, etc., and adds them to a list for people to manually check/fix. *All external sources are encouraged to point to UUIDs, not to the element id. Please note that I've abandoned the functionality of having multiple uuids on a single element (e.g. uuid:building and uuid:shop). I felt that this overcomplicates things from the standpoint of someone clicking on "make permanent link" - they shouldn't have to know anything about the internal workings of OSM and I want to maintain the flexibility to tag *anything*, not just a predetermined list of things. I suppose this could be allowed for advanced users who want to do things by hand, but it's not in this plan. Anthony
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