Egil Hjelmeland <privat <at> egil-hjelmeland.no> writes: >If you prefix tag keys of historic elements with "past:", it will not >interfere with extisting SW conserned with rendering the present state.
Agreed. But as Frederik pointed out, it will confuse people using editors. People often snap together nodes so that a road and an administrative boundary can node share, for example. They might end up snapping to purely historical nodes or even adjusting the historical stuff a bit to fit with other objects, as we might adjust a building's position slightly relative to a road junction. Philosophically, it's great to put useful data in OSM, and historical things can be useful, but until now we've used fairly objective, 'on the ground' criteria to ultimately decide what gets mapped(*). The route of a former railway can be seen on the ground and so is mapped; but something of which no physical trace remains cannot be mapped using purely objective criteria. You'd need a more Wikipedia-like 'verifiability' criterion. (*) With the exception of facts that exist only by human agreement, such as where a county boundary is, or place names, or access rights. Quite a few exceptions actually! Leveraging the OSM infrastructure for historical mapping is a good idea, but not in the same database - at least not at this stage. Maybe if a consensus can be reached and editors can add support for ignoring historical data, the two could live side by side in the same database. But they cannot really affect each other or interact in any way (?), so it seems that a separate database entirely would work fine. That said, historical information can be usefully and objectively added to a present-day map in some circumstances. I often add a note tag for 'former church' or 'formerly known as'. In Britain the Ordnance Survey maps show the site of battles with a crossed swords marker. And administrative boundaries often have no physical existence. More support for mapping this kind of thing would be welcome. -- Ed Avis <[email protected]> _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
