Hi Michał, Thanks for your comments!
On Fri, Aug 5, 2016 at 4:55 PM, Michał Brzozowski <www.ha...@gmail.com> 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
