[Geocoding] GSOC 2021 Project: Interface for reporting search bugs for Nominatim

[Sarah Hoffmann]

Hi Yash,

On Thu, Mar 11, 2021 at 04:41:00PM +0530, Yash Srivastava wrote:
> I am Yash Srivastava, an undergraduate student at the Indian Institute of
> Technology, Roorkee, India. I have been going through this year's proposed
> GSOC projects. I m interested in working on Project: Interface for
> reporting search bugs for Nominatim. I have been digging up on Nominatim,
> Nominatim-UI and Geocoder-Tester codebase and I have also created a PR for
> Nominatim (#2024 <https://github.com/osm-search/Nominatim/pull/2204>) for
> the issue(#2187 <https://github.com/osm-search/Nominatim/issues/2187>).

That's great. Yes, the project is available for the taking.

> Please let me know if the project is available. Also, I have some doubts
> regarding the project listed below based on the issue mentioned in the
> issue(#1847 https://github.com/osm-search/Nominatim/issues/1847 ).
> 
>    - Do we need to create a whole new app for the frontend or integrate
>    this bug interface with Nominatim-UI?

This project should be completely separate from nominatim-ui. The requirements
in terms of usability are likely much different.

>    - Do we need to create a new flask or Django project for the backend or
>    integrate its backend with Nominatim?

The backend should be separate, too. It can be really, really simple. I
could even imagine that it just takes the bug report information from the
frontend and logs it away into a file. If done right, it allows to separate
the data collection from any further processing. 

>    - I m not able to understand why do we need viewport data in search
>    input?

Nominatim has a mode to prefer results close to the current map view.
People sometimes expect different results for that, see for example
https://github.com/osm-search/Nominatim/issues/2211

>    - Do we have to get language data in search and reverse input from
>    headers of the request?

It can be used to seed the language selection field but it should be
made explicit for such an interface which languages are being used.
Again this is a matter of frequent use rconfusion because the language does
have an influence on the order of results, not only on the names displayed.

>    - In the issue for the expected output, does it mean that we need to
>    export the database  to a CSV or YAML file via a python script so that it
>    can be run through Geocoder-Tester?

That would be nice but can be a stretch goal. Getting the user
interaction right is an important part of the project: how a user who does
not know how Nominatim internally works can easily express why and how the
search does not produce the expected results.

Producing Geocoder-Test would help to test that the user interface asks for
the right information about the expected result.

Sarah

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