[OSM-dev] OWL + OSM Activity Server

[Paweł Paprota]

Hi all,

(writing this to the dev@ list as well so others can comment on ideas
presented here)

On today's EWG meeting we briefly discussed the "OWL-powered
activity/history tab" Top Ten Task. From my point of view this is
exactly what Activity Server (AS) has been created for - to aggregate
information like this and present it to the user.

With this message I would like to attempt to start a discussion about
OWL/AS integration.

First I will quickly update you on the AS status.

* First of all, to people who never heard of AS: [2]

* Server API is stabilizing although there are still features to be
added (like activity bounding box/geometry)

* I have started another Github project [3] that contains Activity
Publishers - these are (small) applications that interface with the AS
for creating activities; for now there is a simple implementation of a
Changeset Publisher [4] that uses PostGIS snapshot schema database to
detect new changesets and create activities based on that.

Plans for this week include deploying a demo instance so you can poke
around a running server. Another goal for this week is to start the
frontend part in the Rails Port that will pull activities from the AS
into the user page.

Now, OWL fits into this picture very nicely because implementing a
proper Changeset Publisher is going to be a PITA and also why reinvent
something when there's something that already works. So my idea was to
write a very simple Activity Publisher that pulls the data from OWL and
pushes it into AS. Then the Rails Port pulls the activities from the AS
and voila - TTT done! :-)

At this point I would be interested in learning about OWL status - what
needs to be done to get it up and running, what are the current
challenges, whether there is an API that can be used to pull the data
from OWL etc.

Let me know what you think.

PS. Please, also let me know If something is not clear or for example
the documentation is hard to understand. I sometimes have problems with
expressing my ideas without the use of a whiteboard and I would like to
work on that :-)

[1]
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Top_Ten_Tasks#OWL-powered_activity.2Fhistory_tab
[2] https://github.com/ppawel/osm-activity-server/blob/master/README.md
[3] https://github.com/ppawel/osm-activity-publishers
[4]
https://github.com/ppawel/osm-activity-publishers/tree/master/changeset-publisher

Paweł