Permanent ID for OSM

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 This is an unofficial proposal for a "permanent ID" (osm_pid) for OpenStreetMap (OSM). 
 See here for a more well known place for discussions. 

Goals and Requirements

The goal is to get an opaque (eventually fixed) length ASCII string.

That are the design considerations:

  • The OSM id alone is not stable enough (as probably most agree); and it can represent many concepts (and that's by design in OSM).
  • The version no. of the object is needed which makes clear which tags are (or have been) referred to.
  • Coordinates are needed, because a change of the way and area geometries does not increment the version number.

Format

A stable Permanent ID could have the following form (variable length to a maximum of currently 35 chars):

 [N|W|R]<osm_id>#<version>[+|-]<lon>[+|-]<lat>

where:

  • N,W,R stands for Node, Way, or Relation.
  • osm_id an unsigned big integer ("digits").
  • version is an unsigned integer with a hash in front.
  • coordinates (lat/lon) are signed floats (always showing the +/- sign), with a maximum of 6 digits. In case of a line (linestring) or an area/relation (polygon) geometries the coordinates taken into account are the lat/lon minimum of the geometry.

Example: "Schloss Kyburg" (Castle Kyburg) has relation 1169711, version #5 at coordinates 47.4584, 8.74343 which becomes following Permanent ID:

 osm_pid = R1169711#5+47.4584+8.74343

OSM Permanent ID Service

In order to be really useful, a service should be implemented, which returns most recent object given a possibly old Permanent ID if an object has been changed; thus having another Permanent ID where any of it's parts may have changed (most probably just the version no.).


Alternatives

 See https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Permanent_ID for a more official state of discussions. 

Use OSM id nevertheless (at own risk): ...as is with two fields type (Node, Way, Relation) and osm_id (bigint)... or as a single big integer. It's possible to encode the type (Node, Way, Relation) into the OSM id as a single integer (64 bit): osm_id = <node id> × 10 (eg. 123 → 1230), osm_id = (<way id> × 10) + 1 (eg. 123 → 1231), osm_id (<relation id> × 10) + 4 (eg. 123 → 1234). (Source: Mapbox, see [1]). Example: "Schloss Kyburg" is a relation with id 1169711, so it becomes 11697114.

OpenLR (Location Referencing) a free spec. by TomTom for linear geometries like streets [2].