OpenStreetMap: Difference between revisions

{{Cquote|At the heart of OSM's technical infrastructure lies the central database holding the live data, which is implemented in MySQL. The database schema is designed to support wiki behaviors, such as versioning and rollbacks, and keeps copies of modified or deleted features indefinitely.<br><br>

All geographical entities are recorded as points (nodes), which contain the coordinates alongwithalong with username and timestamp information. Linear and area features are defined by reference to a list of ordered nodes, called "ways". Area features aren't explicitly defined in the database schema. Rather, they're defined implicitly by the condition of a way that's closed (the first node of a way is the same as the last one) and explicit tagging conventions.||| Mordechai (Muki) Haklay, Patrick Weber (2008) "[https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/13849/1/13849.pdf OpenStreetMap : User-Generated Street Maps]" Pervasive Computing IEEE CS 1536-1268/08}}