[OSM-dev] Inserting OSM data

[John Robert Peterson]

I'm going to go back to some of the primative concepts of OSM here, just to
make sure that everyone is on the same page...

OSM has 2 completly destict concepts, tracks and ways: (I am simplifying
here, but you get the idea)

Tracks are a collection of gps points, as they are recorded, generally 1 per
second, but there is a huge deal of variety here. it's slightly more
complicated than that, some people filter them, some people split diferent
journeys or date periods into separate tracks, but it's basicaly that
simple.

Ways are (in this context) a road -- with just enough points along it to
mark the curvature, lots of metadata, and it's always just one road, it will
never span a bunch of roads describing a route.

The trouble here is that there is no link between tracks and ways -- asside
from the fact that they are close to each other. This is for very important
technical reasons. in general once a road has been traversed several times,
and it is clear that the GPS data is good, somone will trace over the (say)
200 gps points that make up the road, by adding a way containing (say) 4
nodes. From that point on, there is no connection.

It is very destructive simply convert traces directly into ways, because it
takes up huge amounts of valuable space in the database, and leads to a lack
of user filtering of bad data. Simply driving past a large metalic building
can thorugh GPS off by a significant distance etc.

I have personally looked into ways of doing exactly what (I think) you are
trying to do, and found that computers just arn't clever enough to match the
data up, and produce good ways from traces.

That's not to say that we either don't want, or can't use your data. what I
would sugest is the following:

You upload data you have as traces, I believe this can be done fairly simply
using the API (i've done it, using CURL, and got it to work) this returns, I
blieve an id that should be useful to you.

You could add the metadata that you have about road staes and single nodes
to the main map data, also farily simple thoguht the API.

You haveto then rely on humans (either you, or us) to trace the data into
good quality ways.

There is also the question of road names I assume that if you have this
data, it will be in some copyrighted form? there is a chance that you have
the address you are delivering to, that may be usable...

JR


2010/3/22 Andreas Höschler <ahoesch at smartsoft.de>

> Hi John,
>
> >> For that we need some kind of TCP-based XML interface so that we could
> >> send a track in some XML format to a TCP socket and get back the IDs
> >> assigned to objects by the public OSM database server. Only that would
> >> allow us the assign the returned IDs to our private database objects
> >> and thus avoid data duplication. Is there such an API (TCP-socket
> >> based)?
> >
> > It's not that simple, because you may need to deal with merging,
> > alternatively you could produce .osm files similar to what JOSM
> > produces and then people can load those files into JOSM and merge or
> > add data to OSM.
>
> Creating OSM files would be easy for us. But where would we sent them?
> Simply put them on our webserver and make an announcement on the osm
> list "hey, we have some osm data to be merged/imported! Have fun!"!?
>
> The other problem is how do we get to know that one of our ways got
> imported into the public OSM database and thus assigned an ID so that
> we can get rid of that way in our private database?
>
> I have just logged into www.openstreetmap.org and found the GPS traces
> pane and the page on which one can upload gps traces. However, where
> can I upload OSM files to with ways having street names, way kind, ...?
>
> Thanks,
>
>  Andreas
>
>
>
>
>
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>
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