[openstreetmap-website] Changeset view (#20)

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Mon, Feb 27, 2012 at 9:30 AM, Tom MacWright <tom at macwright.org> wrote:
> Okay, I'm a bit blocked from doing testing with large changesets that break
> the map, since I have a limited extract of the database around.
>
> I get that the other information is important, but it's important to
> advanced users, and people who don't immediately grasp what a 'node' is are
> blindsided by technical information - and presenting a map with the thing
> highlighted makes it clearer. Hopefully we can please both camps.

I've long thought that what we need is a "simple" and "advanced" view.
I'd been working on a Changeset page driven entirely by Javascript,
with several "views" of the data depending on what the user selected-
everything from a highly stylized "easy" view, to an advanced view
(what we have now, I think, constitutes an advanced view) and finally
a "raw data" view, right from the page.

In a few (<5) hours we'll have our IRC meeting where we'll discuss
this, and I'll have a working prototype of my classification system.
Using it, you'll be able to send it an OSM element in  XML and it'll
return to you human consumable version of the object. In other words,
you might send it something like this:

<node id....>
  <tags>
    <tag k="amenity" v="school">
    <tag k="name" v="James Woods High">
  </tags>
</node>

and it would return to you a classification
{display: "James Woods High", "feature": "school", category: "education"}

This could be used an an external service, or eventually possibly
folded back into the main OSM site/code itself.

This could  changesets easier to understand by providing human readable names.

- Serge