[Geocoding] GSoC 2021 - Extracting QA reports from Nominatim

[Antonin Jolivat]

Hello!

I already introduced myself in more detail here
<https://github.com/osm-search/Nominatim/discussions/2222>. I am Antonin
Jolivat, a student in CESI Engineering School in Orléans, France. I am
really motivated to work on a Nominatim project for the GSoC 2021. I
already submitted a PR which is still under review (#2228
<https://github.com/osm-search/Nominatim/pull/2228>) and I plan to do more
contributions.

First I would like to talk about my approach on the projects list. At the
beginning I planned to focus on the project "Interface for reporting search
bugs for Nominatim" but I saw that Yash Srivastava was already focused on
it. I discussed with him and told him that I will go for the project
"Extracting QA reports from Nominatim" because I think that it is
counterproductive to make a proposal on the same project for both of us,
and I don't mind as the two projects interest me a lot. However we were
wondering if Nominatim has enough slots available to possibly take both of
us. If you have enough vision on it and it is something you can communicate
on, it would be very motivating to have this information (It is only in a
theoretical way, of course it would be under your decision based on our
proposals).

About the project "Extracting QA reports from Nominatim", is it still a
good needed project on which I could work?  I have some questions and I
need more informations in order to dive deeper into it and try to construct
a better understanding of it. I will start by making a global summary of
how I understood the project basically:

Nominatim gets data from the main OSM database and processes them in its
own way in order to make the search engine work. These data are finally
stored in the Postgres database of Nominatim. This processing of data can
reveal some inconsistencies like theses described here
<https://github.com/osm-search/Nominatim/issues/1848>. The goal of the
project is to make a tool which will automatically extract these
inconsistencies and present them in an interface so that OSM mappers can
see them and correct them.

My current questions are:
- If I understood well, should this tool interfere during the data import
process (so when the data are processed)?
- I know I will need to strengthen my mapping skills and my understanding
of how Nominatim processes data, but in the meantime, could you give me an
example of how one inconsistency can be discovered in Nominatim, like
"admin boundaries with more than one member with role 'label'" for example?
- I saw that osmoscope could be a good candidate, does the expected result
look like this one of Brouter: http://brouter.de/osmoscope/?
- I have some questions about it as I don't know much about the ecosystem,
I only want to understand the needs better. I see that osmoscope is not
maintained and updated anymore since 2 years isn't it a problem? And do you
really think that a lot of mappers consult it in order to make corrections
on wrong data? Could you elaborate on what would be your ideal result (even
if it is not the simpler) about the presentation of our QA reports? Like
would it be a specific custom tool or only by using osmoscope or maybe
another thing that I don't think about? My global idea of it is that it
should be easily accessible and intuitive so that any random mapper can use
it and modify data accordingly, it would be a pity if these reports are not
used.

Thanks for your time and your answers.
Antonin
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