[OSM-dev] new oscgrep.pl release

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

    every now and then I have the need to check "what did user X do in 
the last days/weeks/month", or "where was he active".

We will one day have great changeset-based tools to help us with this, 
and if I have a clue about where the user is active then I could also 
use the ITO Mapper of course. But in the absence of both, you can now 
use oscgrep plus a GIS software of your choice for analyses like this.

oscgrep is a utility for extracting items from .osc files. You can 
select by action (modify/add/delete), type (node/way/relation) or a 
regular expression, so

perl oscgrep.pl -t node -a delete user=.johndoe 20090320-20090321.osc.gz

will extract all node deletions by user johndoe from the file.

The new feature is that you can also have oscgrep create a shapefile 
with all the matching nodes:

perl oscgrep.pl -qs myshape user=.johndoe 200903*osc.gz

makes a shapefile that contains all nodes edited by user johndoe in any 
of the diffs (of course these must have been downloaded first). The 
shapefile can then be loaded in qgis or something else to get an idea 
what the user was up to. There's a column in the shapefile data giving 
you the action (modify/add/delete) so you can easily colour the 
resulting display.

(It is unfortunately limited to processing nodes in this manner because 
other objects don't have their position specified in .osc files.)

oscgrep is in SVN, under applications/filter/oscgrep.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"