[OSM-dev] GSoC - Anomaly Detection Engine

[Frederik Ramm]

Adam,

On 05/11/2012 04:52 PM, Adam Velkei wrote:
> Hello, my name is Adam Istvan Velkei, I'm a student from Hungary and I
> got the chance to work on an engine to detect vandalism and other kinds
> of unwanted map edits.

Such an engine could really be useful.

You'll surely have opportunities to discuss the details with your mentor 
but one thing that I find most important is: What happens after your 
project is done.

If your work is to be useful in the long-term, then whatever you write 
must be done in a way that enables other project members to continue to 
work on the software and to maintain it; to tune it for new use cases or 
new types of vandalism and so on.

This is a slight conflict of goals with what GSoC usually is about - you 
are expected to make a proper plan and to carry it out and to wrap it up 
and have a "finished" product at the end.

For OSM and for the long-term usability of your code, having something 
"finished" is good, but it is even more important to have something 
"manageable". It must be done in a non-exotic programming language, it 
must be documented well, it must be easily approachable for Tinkerers.

If you do some sort of giant black box with a fantastic and most elegant 
neuronal network implementation that after so-and-so many rounds of 
machine learning has a 87% probability to find out whether something is 
vandalism or not then that might, while academically very interesting, 
be less useful than a solid set of rather dumb scripts that everyone can 
easily submit patches for!

When you work on your code, try to think of us who will be maintaining 
it later.

Bye
Frederik

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