Authority control
In information science, authority control is the use of external references – stable, unambiguous identifiers – to cross-reference information across multiple reference catalogues or datasets maintained by different organizations.
Some knowledge bases like Wikidata treat OpenStreetMap element IDs as external references. However, we discourage this practice because we can't guarantee that an element ID will remain stable. Nothing stops a given element ID from being repurposed for something unrelated without advance notice. This is particularly true of ways representing linear features like streets, which may be split at any point for many reasons or no reason at all. Instead, data consumers often need to query for an element based on criteria such as its general location and semantically relevant tags.
We also tag individual elements with external references, or "refs", to other datasets and authority control schemes that are more stable. A data consumer can query for elements based on ref tags for more performant, reproducible results. OSM is an important part of the Internet's linked open data ecosystem via technologies such as RDF that use these identifiers in federated queries.
List of external reference keys
Refs appear in a variety of keys, including:
ref=*: Generic ID of an unspecified catalog to be inferred by the map user based on the element type and circumstances*_ref=*andref:*=*(like the keys listed above): ID to a specific catalogwikidata=*: Wikidatawikipedia=*: WikipediaISO3166-1=*andISO3166-1:*=*: ISO country codesISO3166-2=*: ISO province/state/region codes- other domain-specific tags