[talk-au] NearMap support for OSM editing
Hi all I thought I'd bounce this topic off the talk-AU list before waking up the slumbering millions on talk :) Without giving too much away, I'm letting you know that NearMap are looking at/working on adding support for some basic OSM editing operations to our website. We're doing this to more directly address some of the weaknesses of OSM; in particular, absence of street names and building numbers. I'd be interested in your opinions on what we're doing: as ever, our aim here is to improve and support the OSM data :) We are not building a replacement for Potlatch/JOSM - those tools are way too complex for a generalist audience and anyone who wants to do more in-depth mapping work will be encouraged to sign up at the OSM site and use the tools available. Our first release will support just those tasks mentioned above, using as simple a UI as we can build; add or correct a street name, and add or correct a house number (or a set of them). Adding this support is a reasonably non-trivial task, since right now the OSM data is used to drive a rendering process chain that generates the street map tiles (you might be interested to know that we render many of these on demand, in real-time). That uses a lossy import of the OSM data, since until recently all that we needed to have was enough data for rendering. We're now working on an import that preserves enough contextual information to support edits; key attributes being osm_id (and yes, we've been following John's suggestions about UUIDs with interest). Right now, our strategy is to relay edits back to the OSM servers in near-real-time, so that we can verify the most recent state of an OSM entity and confirm the changelist and version numbers for our edits. Now, we're aiming to make the process of adding/fixing up OSM data as easy as possible: in this case, that includes not requiring that an editing user have an OSM registration (since the process of signing up for one is sufficiently out of our control to make it difficult to integrate well into the NearMap site). We do have our own registration system, and we're going to require that a user be registered with us before we allow them to make edits. Because of the above, edits applied to the OSM data would be submitted by a nearmap user. We're planning to tag edited OSM entities with information sufficient to identify the NearMap user who made the edit. We'll also be tracking the history of edits by users in our core database. A key question is the best way that we can handle vandalism (the all-too-common downside of widening the user base). In the event that bad edits are reported or noticed we can, in theory, revert some or all the changes made by that user, but it's currently unclear how possible that becomes once those edits are established (and hence possibly used as the basis for subsequent edits). This is one reason we're only enabling specific, simple edits to start with; these are more easily reversible in ways other than just reverse the changelist. Comments welcome :) Cheers Ben -- Ben Last Development Manager (HyperWeb) NearMap Pty Ltd ___ Talk-au mailing list Talk-au@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au
Re: [talk-au] NearMap support for OSM editing
On 8 June 2010 16:09, Ben Last ben.l...@nearmap.com wrote: Without giving too much away, I'm letting you know that NearMap are looking at/working on adding support for some basic OSM editing operations to our website. We're doing this to more directly address some of the weaknesses of OSM; in particular, absence of street names and building numbers. I'd be interested in your opinions on what we're doing: as ever, our aim here is to improve and support the OSM data :) Do you know about the mapzen editor cloudmade produced? http://mapzen.cloudmade.com/ ___ Talk-au mailing list Talk-au@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au
Re: [talk-au] NearMap support for OSM editing
On 8 June 2010 14:27, John Smith deltafoxtrot...@gmail.com wrote: Do you know about the mapzen editor cloudmade produced? http://mapzen.cloudmade.com/ Yes, we do, and whilst it's an interesting piece of work, it's still too complex for general users (in our humble opinion!). It would also require users to register with CloudMade to use it, and we wouldn't get visibility of their edits (until they came down the feed from OSM). Cheers Ben -- Ben Last 0423 475 673 Development Manager (HyperWeb) NearMap Pty Ltd ___ Talk-au mailing list Talk-au@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au
Re: [talk-au] NearMap support for OSM editing
On Tue, 8 Jun 2010, Ben Last wrote: On 8 June 2010 14:27, John Smith deltafoxtrot...@gmail.com wrote: Do you know about the mapzen editor cloudmade produced? http://mapzen.cloudmade.com/ Yes, we do, and whilst it's an interesting piece of work, it's still too complex for general users (in our humble opinion!). It would also require users to register with CloudMade to use it, and we wouldn't get visibility of their edits (until they came down the feed from OSM). Cheers Ben we had a conversation on one of these lists about what would be wanted in a bog_basic editor once and i think it came down to name and classify a street and add a single point to be a POI, name and classify it. ___ Talk-au mailing list Talk-au@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au
Re: [talk-au] NearMap support for OSM editing
On Tue, 2010-06-08 at 17:13 +1000, Liz wrote: On Tue, 8 Jun 2010, Ben Last wrote: Yes, we do, and whilst it's an interesting piece of work, it's still too complex for general users (in our humble opinion!)... we had a conversation on one of these lists about what would be wanted in a bog_basic editor once and i think it came down to name and classify a street and add a single point to be a POI, name and classify it. Sounds like the editing features in gosmore, add node/way, add name/type to highway, and add one of a preset number of POIs (fuel is the only one that comes to mind at the moment). David ___ Talk-au mailing list Talk-au@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au
Re: [talk-au] NearMap support for OSM editing
we had a conversation on one of these lists about what would be wanted in a bog_basic editor once and i think it came down to name and classify a street and add a single point to be a POI, name and classify it. Personally I would not like to see much more than this and I don't think being able to reclassify a street is suitable without strict guidelines and/or limits (eg an untagged way). For issues with these have a look around Fremantle at the moment and you'll see a number of oddly classified roads (secondary - trunk - secondary - trunk in the space of a few blocks). Anything more than this and it would lead to easy vandalism and I can see lots of nearmap staff time being occupied with reverts rather than other things (like imagery of North Qld ;)). The POI's should be select and choose, with the only text option being the name and addresses. All up though it would be great to have extra street names added and address as well. -- Cheers Ross ___ Talk-au mailing list Talk-au@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au
Re: [talk-au] NearMap support for OSM editing
Sounds good. Clear simple support for adding addresses would be especially useful. This is probably the area that OSM is furthest behind other online maps and its not improving very quickly at the moment. --- On Tue, 8/6/10, Ross Scanlon i...@4x4falcon.com wrote: From: Ross Scanlon i...@4x4falcon.com Subject: Re: [talk-au] NearMap support for OSM editing To: talk-au@openstreetmap.org Received: Tuesday, 8 June, 2010, 6:40 PM we had a conversation on one of these lists about what would be wanted in a bog_basic editor once and i think it came down to name and classify a street and add a single point to be a POI, name and classify it. Personally I would not like to see much more than this and I don't think being able to reclassify a street is suitable without strict guidelines and/or limits (eg an untagged way). For issues with these have a look around Fremantle at the moment and you'll see a number of oddly classified roads (secondary - trunk - secondary - trunk in the space of a few blocks). Anything more than this and it would lead to easy vandalism and I can see lots of nearmap staff time being occupied with reverts rather than other things (like imagery of North Qld ;)). The POI's should be select and choose, with the only text option being the name and addresses. All up though it would be great to have extra street names added and address as well. -- Cheers Ross ___ Talk-au mailing list Talk-au@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au ___ Talk-au mailing list Talk-au@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au
Re: [talk-au] NearMap support for OSM editing
On 9 June 2010 06:27, Roy Wallace waldo000...@gmail.com wrote: In particular, how will you ensure that contributors via Nearmap agree to the OSM/OSMF contributing terms/license? Good point. We'll need to include this in TCs that a user must accept before editing. Since we're going to keep the edits for reverting/tracking/whatever, I think John's suggestion of us passing the same rights to OSM works; we'd have to agree to do that anyway when we sign up the -- Ben Last Development Manager (HyperWeb) NearMap Pty Ltd ___ Talk-au mailing list Talk-au@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au
Re: [talk-au] NearMap support for OSM editing
On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 4:09 PM, Ben Last ben.l...@nearmap.com wrote: the NearMap site). We do have our own registration system, and we're going to require that a user be registered with us before we allow them to make edits. Because of the above, edits applied to the OSM data would be submitted by a nearmap user. We're planning to tag edited OSM entities with information sufficient to identify the NearMap user who made the edit. We'll also be tracking the history of edits by users in our core database. I suspect this approach will prove controversial. Is there really no way you can integrate user registrations? I do like the idea of tagging addresses though. In particular, it would be great if your system made it easy to tag corner addresses, and interpolate between them (using the current interpolation scheme - which I'm not very familiar with). One issue that occurs with allowing street name changes is that you may need to allow users to split streets. Also, you may want to point out to them that one (previously unnamed) street/way runs into another unnamed street/way. Steve ___ Talk-au mailing list Talk-au@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au
Re: [talk-au] NearMap support for OSM editing
On 9 June 2010 09:13, Steve Bennett stevag...@gmail.com wrote: I suspect this approach will prove controversial. Is there really no way you can integrate user registrations? There's no convenient way. We could bounce a user off to the OSM site to register, but this is complex because they then need to confirm an email, and after the signup there (appears to be) no convenient way to bring them back to our site. We'd then have to ask them to enter their OSM username and password since we can't easily tell whether they are registered/logged in with OSM (the OSM login cookies are for the openstreetmap.org domain). In short, the OSM site doesn't appear to have been designed with the intention of supporting login integration with external services. There are ways around many of the issues, but we'd end up doing a fair amount of work to integrate closely with an external site that may then change the way it works, breaking the flow for our users. I do like the idea of tagging addresses though. In particular, it would be great if your system made it easy to tag corner addresses, and interpolate between them (using the current interpolation scheme - which I'm not very familiar with). Yep; getting numbers for corners of blocks is a pretty effective way to boost geocoding accuracy with minimal data. Though it works better in a US-style block system than in, say, rural areas of the UK :) One issue that occurs with allowing street name changes is that you may need to allow users to split streets. Also, you may want to point out to them that one (previously unnamed) street/way runs into another unnamed street/way. Splitting streets may fall into the area where the edit gets more complex than we want to support (at least for the first release). But yes, there is an issue there, depending on how farsighted the person was who originally traced the street :) Cheers b -- Ben Last Development Manager (HyperWeb) NearMap Pty Ltd ___ Talk-au mailing list Talk-au@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au
Re: [talk-au] NearMap support for OSM editing
On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 11:22 AM, Ben Last ben.l...@nearmap.com wrote: There's no convenient way. We could bounce a user off to the OSM site to register, but this is complex because they then need to confirm an email, and after the signup there (appears to be) no convenient way to bring them back to our site. We'd then have to ask them to enter their OSM username and password since we can't easily tell whether they are registered/logged in with OSM (the OSM login cookies are for the openstreetmap.org domain). In short, the OSM site doesn't appear to have been designed with the intention of supporting login integration with external services. There are ways around many of the issues, but we'd end up doing a fair amount of work to integrate closely with an external site that may then change the way it works, breaking the flow for our users. Oops, could have been clearer. By integration, I meant asking the OSM developers to make some changes to make it easier, too. But yeah, if not possible, not possible. Yep; getting numbers for corners of blocks is a pretty effective way to boost geocoding accuracy with minimal data. Though it works better in a US-style block system than in, say, rural areas of the UK :) Some parts of the US are pretty crazy too. My favourite though is a scheme I saw in Dallas (and I'm sure exists elsewhere) where the numbers are independent of the street, and uniquely identify a house within some region. So a tiny cul-de-sac can have street numbers in the thousands, and an address can effectively be 41029 Dallas. Splitting streets may fall into the area where the edit gets more complex than we want to support (at least for the first release). But yes, there is an issue there, depending on how farsighted the person was who originally traced the street :) Speaking as a tracer, it's very hard to guess where to break a street. You don't want to break them too short either, because then people down the track are more likely to only label half the street... Steve ___ Talk-au mailing list Talk-au@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au
Re: [talk-au] NearMap support for OSM editing
On 9 June 2010 11:28, Steve Bennett stevag...@gmail.com wrote: Oops, could have been clearer. By integration, I meant asking the OSM developers to make some changes to make it easier, too. But yeah, if not possible, not possible. I have and didn't get much of a useful reply... It would be so much easier for an API to allow people to sign up, and I fully sympathise with Ben's position. ___ Talk-au mailing list Talk-au@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au
Re: [talk-au] NearMap support for OSM editing
On 9 June 2010 11:28, Steve Bennett stevag...@gmail.com wrote: Some parts of the US are pretty crazy too. My favourite though is a scheme I saw in Dallas (and I'm sure exists elsewhere) where the numbers are independent of the street, and uniquely identify a house within some region. So a tiny cul-de-sac can have street numbers in the thousands, and an address can effectively be 41029 Dallas. I thought that was pretty common for most/all of the US? They have an occasional thing on TV here where someone gets the fine for someone else because of similar names and street name/numbers, although if they couldn't make that mistake I'm sure others would be made :) ___ Talk-au mailing list Talk-au@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au
Re: [talk-au] NearMap support for OSM editing
1. It's too hard to get Nearmap users to go through the signup process for OSM For a given value of hard :) Yes, right now we think it's too complex and there's also no easy way for us to tell if they're already signed up/logged into OSM. Yep. I guess it would involve asking them to sign up twice. Interesting point... is a given Nearmap user any less trustworthy than a given OSM user? :) Or are you thinking that this would be a result of us making it easier to make changes? A fair question. I'm working under the assumption that a nearmap user is most likely unfamilar with OSM or how to edit ways and POIs according to the agreed standards; otherwise you wouldn't be trying to make it easier for your users to edit OSM data :) That's a good idea, but it doesn't help us address one key requirement, which is that we want to allow users to make corrections on the map and see the results of those changes in very short order (preferably immediately). The OSM data structure is not well suited to us storing edits locally and using them to correct the data used for rendering, so our preference if to resubmit the edits back to OSM as soon as possible so that we can regenerate the maps from the OSM updates. I guess a compromise would be to display another layer that contains all the suggested changes that have been made by all the different nearmap users. People would be able to see oh someone's already flagged that for an edit, and see what the status of all the suggestions are (Accepted, Reviewed, In progress, Fixed, Won't Fix etc). Sort of like a GIS Bugzilla. -- Voon-Li Chung chun...@gmail.com.au ___ Talk-au mailing list Talk-au@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au
