Kate Chapman wrote: > Why aquiesce to use tags at all, making > data more consistent just burdens *our* data with stuff other people > want to do with it.
It is impossible to create a map that displays buildings if no one adds buildings to the database. Adding buildings requires effort, but it is _necessary_ effort for something that many mappers want our data to be used for. Linking to OSM, however, is entirely possible without placing an additional burden on mappers: Implement a service that resolves queries for OSM objects. Therefore, manually maintaining IDs in the database is an unnecessary waste of mappers' time. Besides the effort required for manual ID maintenance, I think that manual IDs would even turn out to be semantically questionable. They cannot easily represent which aspects of the "object" are referenced by the ID. If a restaurant moves, should it keep the same ID? If it is renamed? If it goes bankrupt, is sold, renovated, and reopened by a different owner? Setting up a query would ideally encode your intentions - do you e.g. query for "restaurant at address" or "restaurant with name/owner in town"? A mapper maintaining a restaurant ID has no chance to know the intentions of people linking to the restaurant, and it is easily possible that different people even use that same ID with incompatible intentions. -- Tobias Knerr _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk