Here is my new idea :

We can make a semantic web plugin for josm.

the idea would be to map the JOSM/OSM object into OWL.

we would be able to export the current dataset into rdf/owl.
this is being done in linkedgeodata in mass.
http://linkedgeodata.org/About
I would like to do that for single files.

Then we could process the rdf data with an validator, be able to infer new attribute values using an ontology.

That way we could run all types of checks, be able to include other knowledge from other data sources and use that to update our maps.

The validator would basically manipulate the data in rdf format.

The Proof engine could be anything, from cwm
http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/doc/cwm.html
to
pellet :
http://www.mindswap.org/2003/pellet/

Ideally would be able to manipulate the osm data in rdf in memory.
Second best would be some GRDDL access to the OSM data.
The other solution would be to convert it UGH.

OK. Well maybe I could just write my own validator plugin... but it would be nicer to just define rules and leave the work to the inference engine.

mike