Potential approach on amenities like the initial example: use of RFC 4122 UUIDs as identifier
Based on my inferences here, I suspect the approach we would saw in next months from that other foundation on the hyped “Global Entity Reference System” might be not much more than simply… long random UUIDs that could be generated by any tool (since they’re so random unlikely to clash unless the user wants it).
I’m personally more interested in getting permanent place identifiers for the big, more reusable things (still drafting it), BUT, yes, UUIDs, for data that is from outside, can be useful as keys for conflagration (this is why I’m already comminenting thishere, so others might get interested to explore this approach). The internal persistent ID on OpenStreetMap (like is on Wikidata, but there is prefixed with Q) could still be numeric (and have all the advantages of versioning) but this is later discussion, but something like UUIDs might be relevant in special for things that are like amenities and points of interest. But this could even be implemented today with tag-values, and the rest become syntactic sugar (e.g. something that just displays metadata, without geometries, based purely on a new kind of key or namespace key for complex cases).