Hiya, 2009/10/6 Andy Allan <gravityst...@gmail.com>: > On Tue, Oct 6, 2009 at 8:46 AM, Frederik Ramm <frede...@remote.org> wrote: >> If we really want to head in a direction where external users refer to >> OSM objects, then I think it would be wise to manifest that in the >> database somehow, and create some kind of "permanence API" or so, where >> you can request a permanent handle for a certain object from the API, >> and the API will give you a number, and then if someone deletes and >> re-creates an object they will be able to transfer that number to the >> new object somehow. > > I'm a fan of the fuzzy matching that Wikitravel Press are using, for > two main reasons - it works in theory, and it works in practise too. > Most importantly - neither project knows what the primary key of the > other is, and that makes everything more robust.
One problem with that is the unknown legal status of the coordinates data in wikipedia and as a result, the legal status of such matches derived from that data. I also know from practice that such matching is computationally difficult and carries high error rate even when done right -- I have tried doing a similar thing for village names which are non-unique and the results always needed a human to check and correct part of the matches. This doesn't disqualify this approach but whatever system will use the automatic matches will probably allow users to correct matches that are found to be wrong and the corrections will need to be stored some way at which point you're back to the original problem of what to use for the foreign key. If we can come up with a permanence API like that described by Frederik, I would love to see it, but this also is difficult to do sensibly. Cheers _______________________________________________ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
