[OSM-dev] Software development - most pressing issues

[Robert (Jamie) Munro]

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Gervase Markham wrote:
> Martijn van Exel wrote:
>> * The focus shifts - away from acquiring new data to improving the  
>> quality of existing data. This creates the need for a kind of 'mobile  
>> lightweight JOSM'.
> 
> What do you mean by this? The current JOSM, together with a laptop, a 
> GPS puck, livegps and surveyor (both of which could indeed do with some 
> work) is a reasonable basis for a mobile surveying station to improve 
> data quality.

I think by mobile he means something that will run on a smartphone, or a
PDA or a TomTom device. It would also be good if you could load, for
example, the whole UK into it and it not slow down to a crawl. Currently
on my laptop, even just loading all of Oxford makes JOSM unusably slow.

Gosmore is a promising project in this direction, and yesterday I
discovered WhereAmI for Symbian phones: http://www.symbianos.org/projects/47
which looks very promising, but isn't ready for prime time yet (at least
not without a bluetooth GPS device - even though it has support for
using GSMloc to get a rough location).

I think we should develop these apps into combined navigation/surveying
apps that can be used to improge the data as people navigate. For
example, they should detect when the HDOP of the GPS is less than the
distance to the nearest road and indicate to the user that the area they
are in needs surveying. It should also detect when people don't follow
an instruction and ask them if that is because they made a mistake, or
if there was a problem with the instructions (like a one way street the
other way). It could also prompt when the name of the current road is
unknown etc., and it should have a feature that lets you easily add
missing side roads as you pass them, so that other mappers can be told
of where there are roads that need surveying.

If we can make a solution for TomTom devices (which run linux) and get
1% of TomTom users to use us instead of pay extra money to be allowed to
share the data with TomTom themselves via TomTom's mapshare, we would
have 100,000 extra users travelling all over the world, and we would get
all the missing parts fixed in no time.

Robert (Jamie) Munro
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