[talk-au] NearMap support for OSM editing

[Ben Last]

Hi all

I thought I'd bounce this topic off the talk-AU list before waking up the
slumbering millions on talk :)

Without giving too much away, I'm letting you know that NearMap are looking
at/working on adding support for some basic OSM editing operations to our
website.  We're doing this to more directly address some of the weaknesses
of OSM; in particular, absence of street names and building numbers.  I'd be
interested in your opinions on what we're doing: as ever, our aim here is to
improve and support the OSM data :)

We are not building a replacement for Potlatch/JOSM - those tools are way
too complex for a generalist audience and anyone who wants to do more
in-depth mapping work will be encouraged to sign up at the OSM site and use
the tools available.  Our first release will support just those tasks
mentioned above, using as simple a UI as we can build; add or correct a
street name, and add or correct a house number (or a set of them).

Adding this support is a reasonably non-trivial task, since right now the
OSM data is used to drive a rendering process chain that generates the
street map tiles (you might be interested to know that we render many of
these on demand, in real-time).  That uses a "lossy" import of the OSM data,
since until recently all that we needed to have was enough data for
rendering.  We're now working on an import that preserves enough contextual
information to support edits; key attributes being osm_id (and yes, we've
been following John's suggestions about UUIDs with interest).  Right now,
our strategy is to relay edits back to the OSM servers in near-real-time, so
that we can verify the most recent state of an OSM entity and confirm the
changelist and version numbers for our edits.

Now, we're aiming to make the process of adding/fixing up OSM data as easy
as possible: in this case, that includes not requiring that an editing user
have an OSM registration (since the process of signing up for one is
sufficiently out of our control to make it difficult to integrate well into
the NearMap site).  We do have our own registration system, and we're going
to require that a user be registered with us before we allow them to make
edits.

Because of the above, edits applied to the OSM data would be submitted by a
"nearmap" user.  We're planning to tag edited OSM entities with information
sufficient to identify the NearMap user who made the edit.  We'll also be
tracking the history of edits by users in our core database.

A key question is the best way that we can handle vandalism (the
all-too-common downside of widening the user base). In the event that bad
edits are reported or noticed we can, in theory, revert some or all the
changes made by that user, but it's currently unclear how possible that
becomes once those edits are established (and hence possibly used as the
basis for subsequent edits).  This is one reason we're only enabling
specific, simple edits to start with; these are more easily reversible in
ways other than just "reverse the changelist".

Comments welcome :)

Cheers
Ben

-- 
Ben Last
Development Manager (HyperWeb)
NearMap Pty Ltd
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