On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 5:21 PM, Frederik Ramm <frede...@remote.org> wrote: > Relying on numeric IDs is never going to work, and there is no way how this > could be made to work in the future. IDs are OSM internal identifiers and if > you use them for anything external then you're lost.
If your definition of "work" is "guaranteed to work under all circumstances no matter what", then sure. But if it's "continue to function subject to a slow rate of linkrot no higher than expected for the data in question", then I don't see a major issue. Most OSM data is very stable. Mapped streets don't change much. Merging is a very rare event. Splitting short ways is uncommon, and the results aren't particularly catastrophic (as you point out, the ID would refer to have the way). > It is even conceivable > that, for whatever reason, IDs are changed on a grand scale - for example I > expect API 0.7 to introduce some kind of area data type which will likely > lead to lots of existing areas being changed in some way and that might > include a new ID. Let's avoid that if possible. > The generally accepted wisdom - although not fully implemented or > extensively used - is that you need to make fuzzy links like "a node with > amenity=pub and name=The Old Dog in this area". Vapourware solutions are nice, but when people have a problem today, they need a solution that exists today. Steve _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
