[OSM-dev] Interest in Vandalism Detection Project

[Andy Townsend]

On 29/08/2016 14:04, Kamalpreet Grewal wrote:
> Hello everyone

Hello Kamalpreet, and welcome to OpenStreetMap!

> I am Kamalpreet Kaur Grewal. I am a post-graduate student, pursuing
> M.Tech. (CSE), at Guru Nanak Dev Engineering College, Ludhiana.
>
> I find OSM very interesting. I would like to contribute by working on
> the project 'Detection of Vandalism'. I have gone through [1] and some
> other pages on the Wiki like [2], [3] and few others to understand
> what has been the status so far.
>
> I would like to work on this project. Please tell me from where I should start.

The first thing that I'd mention is that OSM is really more of a 
"platform" than a "project" - lots of things work with it, and many of 
the things that work with OSM data arenn't joined to other things that 
work with OSM data (you've probably already noticed this from reading 
[2] below).  So there isn't really a "central OSM project to detect 
vandalism", there are lots of people using lots of tools to detect 
anomalies in the OSM data (and fix them).

The second thing is that personally I have a bit of a problem with the 
word "vandalism" to describe what most of these tools do, since most of 
the data problems that people looking for data anomalies find aren't 
really vandalism at all but mistakes of one form or another (for 
example, only today someone noticed that a particular building had been 
uploaded 26 times by accident).  There are exceptions (politically 
motivated renamings is an example of a problem that OSM's Data Working 
Group[4] deals with), but actual vandalism is thankfully rare.

So I guess that the first thing that you'd need to do would be to define 
the problem that you're trying to solve.  You've started in the right 
place by looking at what the community's doing already - to see what 
people are saying to each other as they add things to OSM you can have a 
look at http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-discussions .  Some (most) of 
the comments on there are just helping other mappers to do better, but 
sometimes you'll see "this is spam and I've reverted it" comments.

What I'd also do is try and get a feel for adding data to OSM yourself - 
try and map things in your local area, if you haven't already.  That way 
you'll understand what people updating OpenStreetMap are trying to do, 
and it'll help you to "define the problem" above.

Best Regards,

Andy Townsend

>
> [1]: http://neis-one.org/2016/01/suspicious-osm/
> [2]: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Detect_Vandalism
> [3]: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:Emacsen
>
> Thank you.
>
[4] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Data_working_group (I'm a member 
of that group)