[OSM-dev] GSOC application /OSM/ Improved GPS workflow with JOSM

[Karl Newman]

On Fri, Apr 11, 2008 at 8:18 AM, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> >>  I just chatted with our server admin TomH and he thinks that the
> >>  gpsbabel part might best be done on the server side. It's one of his
> >>  long-term ToDo things anyway. I agree. Rather than getting gpsbabel
> >>  installed on every users computer, why not make it upload other
> formats
> >>  too and convert on the server side.
>
> >  Thats a great idea .. but what I actually thinking of was some plugin
> > to let JOSM do the download from GPS device rather that a long Command
> > in CLI( command line interface).
>
> I think this is the important bit... gpsbabel contains an immense amount
> of proprietary protocol/driver code for lots of GPSes. You can't sort
> that out on the server, it has to be done client-side. The actual file
> conversion could be done server-side but then again, if people want to
> process their files in JOSM, they'd have to wait until the server has
> finished processing and then retrieve their tracks back from there or
> what?
>
> Frankly I see more problems than merit in a server-side solution. Not
> least because nobody in their right mind would upload a proprietary
> format GPS file to some server without knowing what's inside... or would
> they ;-)?
>
> Bye
> Frederik
>

Plus, you could end up with a lot of garbage and noise. I carry my GPS with
me a lot, and I'm usually not dedicated to mapping, so I get a lot of
spurious tracks. I'm going through right now and cleaning up my tracks,
cutting out clusters of points where I stopped, etc. If people upload their
raw tracks and they go directly into the server, that will eliminate the
chance for the tracks to be cleaned up. However, I guess you could say the
sort of people that need to upload raw tracks to a server to be translated
are not going to be the sort that are inclined to edit their tracks...
That's sort of another point--I've already seen a bunch of junk "noisy"
tracks in my area. It would be nice if there were a way to remove/filter
them. I could create a tracklog that wrote "Hi Mom" or some other less
innocent graffiti in GPX and upload it and nobody but the admins would be
able to fix/remove it.

Karl
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/dev/attachments/20080411/d748e0ff/attachment.html>