[HOT] Customizable OSM editor

Thomas Tolloschek cadderly at lumpaczik.org
Sat Jun 6 14:15:28 UTC 2015


Hi all,
I am following the Hot Mailinglist for a while as passive reader and
since Nepal more active.

These last weeks I was thinking a lot how to help new mappers while
achieving more standardisation and compareable output.

In my opinion HOT needs a highly customizable and automatic configurable
editor.
Think of some sort of Potlatch where the items are automtically
restricted to the ones needed by a specific task. All the tags and
comments are automatically filled in.
For example: The user just needs to draw a polygon click on the house
button and save. No more confusion if building=yes or building=house
should bei used
All the presets are done by the Taskmanager and the defined task attributes.

If you look at the various statistics, you will see that a high
percentage of the edits has been done in the first few days after the
desaster by new OSM users.
Many of them contribute only a few changesets or less. I was asking
myself why this happened.
Was there not enough help und information? I dont think so.
I think that the informations have been too much and too spread for
first time users. And l think that many of them where overwhelmed by all
the things they have to think about.

So why not moving the rule and format stuff into an editor?

The avantages of such an editor would be:
a) No bothering with tags, comments, etc.
b) Reduction of the chance of duplicates. Because no elements outside
the task elements are allowed.
c) Standardisation, through predefined tags and elements
d) Simple to use interface for users who want to help but dont want to
know the in depth details. ( Those who want to know will switch to
another editor anyway)
e) optional integrated help
f) automatic functionality like squared buildings

I know this does not help for the Nepal crisis mapping but I think this
idea is worth a thought for improving the quality of data in the future
while motivating new users to map more and therefore speeding up the
completion of HOT tasks.

Kind regards
Thomas

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