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Lookups

OpenStreetMap famously does not have Permanent IDs so how does Social Maps allow its users to look up places in its database?

Social Maps has a dedicated API endpoint to look up a place that requires the name and the geo-coordinates (i.e. latitude and longitude) of the place that the user is trying to retrieve (e.g. "Blackrock Castle" at 51.9001, -8.4024). The idea is that "name + location" is how we humans think when we define and distinguish a place from others. Therefore, the location does not have to be exact either, just good enough for the name provided to be unambiguously referring to a single place in that area.

Notice how our "name + location" approach is completely independent of OpenStreetMap IDs (e.g. way/102437857 for "Blackrock Castle"). This is intentional as OpenStreetMap IDs are not stable/permanent identifiers, as also explained on Permanent IDs. In addition, some OpenStreetMap clients such as Organic Maps1 do not store OpenStreetMap IDs in their offline database so it would be impossible for them to look up places by OpenStreetMap IDs, whereas they can easily look up using "name + location".

  1. See the following discussions on their issue tracker:

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