Re: [OSM-talk] Building a free/open reviews community w/ OSM support
Thanks all for the helpful responses. I'll explore using the Overpass API and its "permanent ID" feature [1] for now. I do tend to agree with Joost that it makes sense for OSM to have a policy for external identifiers -- even if the threshold is not one that this project can meet yet. :) It'll be a couple of months before I have something OSM-related to show. If you're interested in following the project in the meantime, here's a few links: * GitHub repo: https://github.com/eloquence/lib.reviews * Dev diary: https://lib.reviews/team/6bfc0390-e218-4cb7-a446-2046cb886435 * Discussion list: http://www.freelists.org/list/lib.reviews * IRC: #lib.reviews on FreeNode (my bouncer is always online, so you can leave me messages there) And if you want to play with the current state and need an invite code, give me a shout off-list. Thanks again -> re-lurking, Erik [1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Overpass_API/Permanent_ID ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Building a free/open reviews community w/ OSM support
On Mon, Aug 8, 2016 at 2:56 AM, joost schouppe wrote: > Keeping OSM and an external database linked is no mean feat. Say you load a > McDonalds POI to your database and someone reviews it. But then a mapper > comes along and changes the node to a line. Upon the next update of your POI > database, your review will not find the object it linked to before, because > it no longer exists. That makes sense. I'm assuming when you say "line", that means "way" in formal OSM terminology? From a data consumer's point of view, when I look up the original node ID, do I just get a "not found", or is there an easy way to tell that there's a new way or relation now representing the same object? Last but not least, do you have a sense how common this category of change is for typical POIs? Any external community-maintained database will typically at least deal with merges or deletions. In those cases where my sync job doesn't know what to do, my default would be to add the record to a work log where the community can decide what to do. But of course I'd like to keep those cases to a minimum. > - add an external ID to OSM. This would be analogue to the current wikidata > tag. I like that proposal a lot, and I think it might get more community acceptance if it was restricted to open data projects (by definitions such as [1] and [2]). While lib.reviews is still very immature, for example, it already offers regularly produced database downloads (see [3]) and is of course fully freely licensed. IOW, anyone wanting to set up a mirror of OSM data that also incorporates lib.reviews data would be able to do so. [1] http://freedomdefined.org/Definition [2] http://opendefinition.org/od/2.1/en/ [3] https://lib.reviews/static/downloads/dumps ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Building a free/open reviews community w/ OSM support
On Fri, Aug 5, 2016 at 7:48 PM, Pine W wrote: Hi Pine, Nice to run into you here! > Hod do you plan to develop readership for this site? Yelp seems to have a > commanding lead. To begin with, I think the most important question is whether this is something of importance to the free culture movement -- people like us who care about works being free to share and build upon, without control by any single organization, and with the technology being re-usable by others along with the content. I personally obviously think it's an important problem to work on -- user-created reviews are pervasive, important and typically proprietary, along with the sites that host them. Moreover, there are obvious conflicts of interest at play that can be mitigated through a more open approach without a commercial motive by the site operator. Finally, I hope that we can ultimately add useful metadata beyond just "is this a good product", e.g., about a company's environmental or labor record. If enough other people agree, then the answer to your question is not what _I_ plan to do :). If we don't care about this problem as a movement (which might legitimately be because other things are more important), then it won't get solved. With that preamble, I personally have a few thoughts on that, of course. For now I'm building out core functionality; once that's done, I want to look into meeting the needs of specialized communities that aren't currently being well-served by commercial players. lib.reviews already has the notion of teams: https://lib.reviews/teams If anyone reading this would like to start a team to review things that already have a matching OSM community, for example, let me know and we'll get that started. I also want to make reviews easily embeddable, Disqus style, so that folks who run small web shops and such can use our software with minimal effort. There's more, but I don't want to take up too much space on the OSM list with not obviously OSM-related aspects of the project, and invite folks who want to brainstorm further about it in general to subscribe to the lib.reviews list, here: http://www.freelists.org/list/lib.reviews Cheers, Erik ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
Re: [OSM-talk] Building a free/open reviews community w/ OSM support
Hi Michał, Thanks for your comments! On Fri, Aug 5, 2016 at 4:55 PM, Michał Brzozowski wrote: > Have you devised any robust algorithm for linking OSM primitives to > objects in the external database? In general case, it seems really > hard to track objects as they get converted from nodes to areas, or > decide whether given OSM feature is no longer representing some entity > in the external database. No, and I'm not very familiar with OSM's data structures and APIs yet. What I'm imagining for now as the initial OSM-related features are: 1) enabling search for POIs similar to http://openpoimap.org/ but more lightweight and purpose-focused (so you can start a review and just select a POI from the map to identify it) 2) importing (and attributing!) relevant data on demand, which by the looks of e.g. https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/422293736 seems like it often includes quite a bit of relevant data that future reviewers would appreciate. If possible, I'd also like to add: 3) flagging imported data as read-only and synchronizing it in regular intervals. People who want to improve that data would then just be pointed to OSM (or Wikidata, or whatever community source). I have no intention of performing a bulk import anytime soon; while this could be good for bootstrapping, it will be too big of a technical challenge too early, I think. Instead for now we'll add/import metadata about things we review if/when we review them. Do you see fundamental technical challenges with any of the above? I don't think conversion from nodes to areas would necessarily be problematic, as long as the sync job can learn that such a change has occurred to the object it's trying to keep in sync. > A framework / API for performing such linking would be of great > interest, as it could enable many applications to exist on top of OSM > - recognizing that not everything belongs to OSM. *nod* OSM-land is interesting compared with the Wikimedia world I'm more familiar with, with much more emphasis on a large distributed community building tools and APIs, some proprietary, some open. I'll want to look at the state of the open tools out there to see if what I'm describing above can already be built, or if there's someone who's willing to collaborate! > Regarding the idea, I reckon it may not scale well, if at all. Weeding > out spammers needs constant attention, and community moderation is > prone to the Sybil attacks. This may be less of a problem on sites > such as OSM or Wikipedia where data needs verifiability that or > another way (so in order to gain trust you have to do actual work). > Reviews are inherently subjective. Not to mention any legal BS one may > get from business owners. Heh, it's certainly a hard problem. :) Here are a few things to note: - Currently the system is invite-only and likely will be for a while. I reckon building a core community that cares about quality, organization, etc. will take a while, and we can then give a lot of those folks permission to also act as moderators so they can ban spammers once we (temporarily or permanently) open the floodgates. Invitation is something we can give away liberally, but it functions as a bit of a barrier to entry for bad faith actors. - I'm building into the architecture strong notions of trust and affiliation. Users can be members of like-minded teams with given rules (think sub-reddit as an analogy), and they can individually express trust toward one another, so we can track the trust graph that allowed an abuser to act with elevated trust levels. Trust will likely factor into ranking calculations, visibility of content, and so on. To give an example, it's already the case that the reviews shown on https://lib.reviews/ are written by users with the "trusted" flag set, while https://lib.reviews/feed shows all (unfiltered) reviews. - In general, my experience with Wikimedia has taught me that transparent community collaboration in good faith is a pretty good way to deal with such problems. Wikimedia has to deal with paid PR flacks regularly, for example, and generally has established procedures for spotting and kicking out such folks. Similarly, WMF has had to face down nasty legal threats long before it had a big budget. As long as I give the community good tools to self-organize rather than following an enterprise-style approach of solving everything from the top down, I am optimistic that we can make decisions such as "when do we open the floodgates" collaboratively.) Warmly, Erik ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
[OSM-talk] Building a free/open reviews community w/ OSM support
Hi all, I'm working on this project: https://lib.reviews/ The front page explains the goal: to build a free, open and non-profit community focused on reviews. Review content is under CC-BY-SA while the codebase is under CC-0. Basic functionality to write reviews is there (we identify things to review by URL for now), but there's a lot more to come. See the screencast on the front page for what is working so far. Language is a first-class citizen: both the UI _and_ all content (including review texts) are fully translatable. The site should be mobile-friendly, and work without JavaScript. I've long been involved with Wikimedia and am also a big fan of OSM; these projects are guiding me in terms of the philosophy and principles behind lib.reviews. See https://lib.reviews/terms which should give some insight into the project philosophy. I've noticed that having reviews associated with OSM data has been proposed before, e.g. [1], and so I am hoping that OSM and lib.reviews can become good friends :). The OSM POI data seems like a good way to bootstrap reviews of restaurants, businesses, and the like. If anyone wants to already get involved in investigating how this could be made to work, I'd be more than happy to schedule a video call to walk you through the codebase and architecture. I'm also happy to answer questions on-list or off-list, and if you'd like an invite-code to play with the functionality that's there so far, shoot me an offlist note or follow the instructions on the site. I believe free/open reviews are a critical component of the free culture ecosystem, alongside maps, encyclopedic content, and other information. If you agree, hope you'll check it out! Warmly, Erik [1] http://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=27837 ___ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
