In some regions of the world OSM is already in a state where many of the map modifications are not due to missing or wrong data, but result from actual changes in the real world, e.g. a building gets demolished.
Given that we store not only the actual state of the DB but also record all kinds of changes that the mappers apply, I wonder if we shouldn't agree on some formal mechanism to distinct the changes where the map gets updated to the real world from those where the edit is done to correct mapping errors, to increase the level of detail or to store them for the first time. Since the introduction of API 0.6 we have in theory one powerful tool where this detail can already be associated to the edit: the changeset comments. The only missing link for effective automated evaluation would be an agreement on a formal way of storing information there (and quite some discipline in structuring your edits and uploads ;-) ). E.g. we could use hashtags to distinguish free text from formal comments ( e.g. #demolishion , #new_construction ,etc) An alternative could be, e.g. for a building that was demolished, to explicitly "map" this. Given an object tagged with building=yes we could change the tag to building=demolished, upload to the server, and in a second step delete the object and upload again. The deletion and second upload could even be automated easily in the editors, if we could agree on something like this. As an advantage with the second method you would not need to structure your edits and changesets in a special way, I'd expect to get more reliable results and less oversight with this approach. Is someone already using a scheme for this kind of information? cheers, Martin _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
