On 05/08/2016 07:56, Abhishek Gupta wrote:

1. First of all, is OOP being used in the project? Can I have support the project in a way it improves my OOP skills?

Yes, lots of the software are OSM is OO based (and so is pretty much everywhere else in the world today - after all, even OO COBOL is a thing http://www.objs.com/x3h7/oocobol.htm )

If yes,
2. What are the easiest ways to start contributing? (this is the first time I am trying to contribute toward a open source project)

The main page of the OSM wiki

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Main_Page

has a section on "how to develop and use the platform" http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Develop . There are lots of links there.



PS :-
I am third year computer science undergraduate. I have done courses in Database Systems, Object Oriented Programming, Data Structure and Algorithms. Will I be requiring background in anything else to get started?


A couple of other thoughts...

There's a mailing list for "development" stuff over at https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev . I'd also mention IRC - see http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/IRC - there's a global #osm channel on OFTC and also a #osm-dev for development and day to day server admin stuff.

The wiki has a "top 10 tasks" list over at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Top_Ten_Tasks . That's probably worth a read.

There's a help site at https://help.openstreetmap.org/ . That covers more than just development stuff, but you may find answers to questions there.

There are various test servers, so if you're doing anything with OSM's main API please don't write test data to the live server. There's a dev API at http://api06.dev.openstreetmap.org/ (among others) that you can use for testing.


Finally, I'd make a couple of organisational comments...

OSM isn't really an "organised" project in that there isn't one big github repository with everything in it and one main site that everyone uses. You'll probably struggle to find links between stuff. For example, I've linked to the main OSM sites above, but JOSM (one of the main OSM editors, written in Java) has its own site over at https://josm.openstreetmap.de/ , with its own bug tracker, releases etc. The software used to convert OSM data for use with Garmin handhelds is mkgmap, over at http://www.mkgmap.org.uk/ - again, separate releases, documentation, mailing list etc.

OSM at its heart is just a big pile of XML data maintained by a community of mappers. It's not really a "computer science" project in that sense (though of course lots of software is used by OSM and by OSM's users). Because there are so many contributors, data consumers need to constantly think about how to deal with keys and values that they might not expect, though http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Elements (and linked pages) should describe the XML structure OK.

Best Regards (and good luck),

Andy



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