Martin Koppenhoefer wrote:
>There is already much 'history' in OSM that simply can't be accessed easily 
and that volume is growing daily:(

+1, but it is mostly not clear from the current data (and history) whether 
these changes have been made because the former data was wrong or incomplete, 
or because of a change in reality.

This is true, and since the 'delete' process does not provide any means of identifying the reason for a delete it's not easy to fix? Simple changes to a item with a required start_date would at least allow the 'start' of a management process. Removing the start_date element would tag a physical 'delete', while an piece of information with several elements each with a start and end date would provide a valid history to go with that element, with the entries with empty end_dates being the current ground situation. There will be an exponential rise in data since a simple object could have a large number of additional tags each with it's own history, but currently that information is simply buried in the change log without any clear indication if it is valid or not :(

Managing a small part of this type of material for council sites I have developed methods which automatically update historic tags and 'delete' is only available at the engineering level. Each individual item of data is tagged even if it was incorrectly entered. It just gets a tag that allows you to ignore it when appropriate. Some of you may even remember when 'delete' was just a flag and nothing was lost until one also 'packed' the records :)

--
Lester Caine - G8HFL
-----------------------------
Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact
L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk
EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/
Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk
Rainbow Digital Media - http://rainbowdigitalmedia.co.uk

_______________________________________________
Historic mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/historic

Reply via email to