[OSM-dev] GSoC idea: Surveying mobile applciation specialized for OSM-mappers, like mobile Walking Papers, with data upload

[Pavel Melnikov]

Hello everyone!

This year I want to participate in Google's Summer of code for OSM, and
here I propose (or, better yet, develop upon) an idea of Android
application, designed specifically for gathering OSM-related data. Ideally,
it would be a XXI-century Field Papers map, without the need to print and
scan anything and with ability to draw anything by hand, place markers,
photos, and so on. The project proposal is mostly based on Ilya Zverev's
idea <http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code/2013/Project_Ideas#Surveying_application>from
wiki, so I hope he could be a mentor if the project gets accepted.

In more details, the features would include:
* Track recording (with background recording supported).
* Placing of markers (like "this is a restaurant"), text notes, audio
notes, photo notes, all with millisecond precision. Current apps that allow
note recording have a second precision, which make them unreliable at high
speed (e.g. travelling at 150km/h you make 41 meter per second). Speech
recognition (built into Android) can be used to convert audio notes into
text as well.
* Ability to upload this data in mapper-friendly (not simply
traveller-friendly as GPX) format to a remote server, from where it could
be retrieved e.g. by JOSM. Much like gpsies.com, probably with ability to
share, did not think hard on this point, but with all notes and metadata
preserved.
* As a second milestone, a fully-fledged "Field Papers" on a tablet is
proposed. With the ability to draw anything on the map by hand, stylus,
whatever - the background map being shown on an Android device - and to
upload edits made to the server, or to a desktop computer directly into
JOSM.

As for code, some of it may be based on already-existing OsmTracker for
Android, but OsmTracker lacks many features proposed here, e.g. subsecond
precision, voice recognition, uploads in a OSMer-centric format, and
walking papers functionality.

This is actually a sketch of official proposal to GSoC and I hope anyone of
OSM community who is interested will comment and help make a better project
proposal.

Best wishes,
  Pavel

P.S. I guess a proposal should contain some info about myself as well. I am
now doing a Ph.D in geoinformatics, and my hobby is mobile developing (who
would guess)). I am an occasional osm
mapper<http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Pavel%20Melnikov>,
and my humble contributions to osm projects were RSS history filtering
web-app <http://positron96.appspot.com/osmfilter.html> (code
<https://code.google.com/p/openstreetmaps-rss-geofilter/>in Java), changeset
viewer <http://positron96.appspot.com/> (early in alpha, suspended) and a Local
transport and traffic map <https://bitbucket.org/positron96/androsm> for
Android (Not really an OSM project, but is based on OSM tiles. I mostly use
it myself and find it very useful=)
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