[OSM-dev] New Program: Changemonger

[Serge Wroclawski]

Hi all,

It's my birthday today and I have a tradition of giving a gifts on my
birthday. So my birthday gift to the OSM community is Changemonger.

Changemonger makes it easier to understand what's going on in an area.

The original idea is that you can have useful notifications like this:

"emacsen added two school, deleted three roads and an untagged node in
New York City"

Changemonger isn't quite there yet, but it's pretty darn close. Right
now, it would give you a sentence like:

"emacsen edited three roads, two schools and an untagged node".

The core of Changemonger is a new feature system that's built to be
very simple to use and customize. The big feature for Changemonger's
feature system is that it supports multiple taxonomies.

A police station is a building, a municipal facility, and an emergency
service, but buildings, municipal facilities and emergency services
are not inter-related.

There are lots of other cool stuff being built into Changemonger,
beyond the simple interface that's there now. I hope to showcase some
of this functionality soon, but I know this is a project some people
have shown an interest in, so I wanted to release something early.

This early release is fairly fragile, but it supports basic object
matching and a first stab at a grouping algorithm. There's a lot more
to do before it becomes stable and solid enough for production.

The code's on github, here:
https://github.com/emacsen/changemonger

I don't want to spam the list too much about this, so if you have any
technical questions about the code, let me know off-list by email. If
there's interest, I'll set up a mailing list about the project and
announce it here.

Thanks again everyone.

- Serge