On Thu, 2010-11-11 at 00:45 +0100, Frederik Ramm wrote: > Hi, > > David Murn wrote: > > OSM, by its nature, is excellent for retaining historic data, for > > example if a road is realigned, you have a history that shows how it was > > realigned, or if a road changes name, there exists a history of previous > > names. > > I think that you, just as almost everyone else in this discussion, are > wrongly mixing OSM's revision history and true on-the-ground history.
I understand the difference, but what Im saying is on the small scheme of things, with only a couple of years data, that is the current state of OSM. However in 10 years, or 100 years, this 'revision history' will be tied in more closely to 'on-the-ground history'. The key part to OSM revision history, is that it will only record future changes, it wont record the past. Therefore, it is good to keep a history to compare some time in the future to now, but not as good to compare now to sometime in the past. If youre making time-lapse style animations from OSM, chances are you dont want a historic resolution of 1 day anyway, youre more likely to want to compare say, 2000 data to 2010 data to 2020 data, and I believe over time this historic data will exist. What Im trying to say, is if you want a long-term history archive, why not use the data that already exists, rather than adding more data. David _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
