[OSM-newbies] Fwd: OSM Development

Richard Weait richard at weait.com
Sun Jul 11 01:49:35 BST 2010


On Sat, Jul 10, 2010 at 5:38 PM, SteveC <steve at asklater.com> wrote:
>> From: Richard Barnes <barn0357 at umn.edu>
>>>>    This is Richard Barnes. I've been hired by Engineers Without Borders, University of Minnesota as part of an initiative to find a mapping solution for EWB-USA.
>>>>
>>>>    My work includes identifying an existing solution which meets requirements, identifying a solution which can be modified to meet requirements (and helping with said modifications), or designing a program from scratch.
>>>>
>>>>    OSM certainly comes in at the top of the list of solutions I've looked at, but there are several key features missing from what I've been asked to create. Notably, EWB has 300+ projects world-wide, primarily in developing countries. Some of the data these projects generate could be made public (roads, schools, shops, towns, et cetera), but other data is only useful to a project (potential well sites, survey points, et cetera) or private (instances of malaria cases, metadata regarding the health of homes surveyed in an area). Further, the ability to group any sort of data and share the grouped data in a controlled fashion (shared access to private data) with other partners (NGOs, review boards) would be necessary. Grouping would also be used to enable downloading of the raw GPS data at future times for use in the field.
>>>>
>>>>    At present OSM doesn't seem to provide grouping or access sharing features. I've taken note of the warnings against people who provide suggestions without helping. So, there's a question. Are these sorts of features, or some subset of them, in-line with OSM's vision or should they be implemented elsewhere? If a subset useful to the both of us could be implemented, I have the time and resources to commit to that effort.

Hi Richard, and welcome.

I'll have to take some large guesses here about your 300+ projects.  I
expect to miss some corner cases but here I go.

When EWB cares about the area and needs "roads, schools, shops, towns,
et cetera" for their map project, EWB should add the roads, schools,
etc to OpenStreetMap then proceed.

Proposed well sites can be omitted from OSM as they aren't real.
Survey points might be excluded it they are temporary and a node on
the map at 40,30 that says "surveypoint 40.30" is of limited utility.
Health records should be omitted based on impermanence and privacy
issues.

Still, if you need to place these items on the map, you might consider
using OpenLayers to do that.  Here's an example.

http://openlayers.org/dev/examples/dynamic-text-layer.html

Grouping sounds interesting so I'll presume that you mean grouping the
data. Sounds like some OpenLayers and some jquery?  I'll wave my hands
vaguely and hope you can run with that.  Do something cool and show it
to us.

I'm certain what you have in mind for access sharing.




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