[OSM-dev] Feasibility of an 'in the field' mobile editing app?

[Igor Brejc]

Nick Whitelegg wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> Have managed to got hold of a N95 for research purposes through work. One 
> thing that maybe would be useful is an "in the field" editing application 
> for the outdoors, where you walk, the inbuilt GPS on the phone records 
> your track, then you choose a route type (footway, bridleway, road etc) 
> and an appropriate way is created from your track. You repeat this for 
> your whole walk then when you're finished (or even maybe in the field?) 
> you upload the new way to OSM. To avoid the need for (expensive, I should 
> imagine) downloads to the phone, functionality such as checking for 
> duplicate nodes and ways is done server side: if not on the main OSM 
> server, on a proxy server.
>
> I haven't had a great deal of experience in mobile development though, so 
> do people think this is a feasible project? 
>
> Thanks,
> Nick
>
>   
Sounds nice, but there's one problem: creating OSM ways automatically 
from GPS data (without user editing) is not a good idea, for several 
reasons:
- GPS (in)precission: it is a good practice to cover certain path 
several times before actually creating a way
- Depending on your GPS tracking settings, you could end up with a lot 
of unnecessary OSM nodes (while standing still, for example). This could 
be fixed by some data cleaning SW, I suppose, but it should be taken 
into account.

As far as I remember, JOSM by default does not support snapping to GPS 
nodes exactly for these reasons.

Cheers,
Igor

-- 
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