[talk-au] NearMap support for OSM editing

[Steve Bennett]

On Wed, Jun 9, 2010 at 11:22 AM, Ben Last <ben.last at nearmap.com> wrote:
> There's no convenient way.  We could bounce a user off to the OSM site to
> register, but this is complex because they then need to confirm an email,
> and after the signup there (appears to be) no convenient way to bring them
> back to our site. We'd then have to ask them to enter their OSM username and
> password since we can't easily tell whether they are registered/logged in
> with OSM (the OSM login cookies are for the openstreetmap.org domain).  In
> short, the OSM site doesn't appear to have been designed with the intention
> of supporting login integration with external services.
> There are ways around many of the issues, but we'd end up doing a fair
> amount of work to integrate closely with an external site that may then
> change the way it works, breaking the flow for our users.

Oops, could have been clearer. By "integration", I meant asking the
OSM developers to make some changes to make it easier, too. But yeah,
if not possible, not possible.

> Yep; getting numbers for corners of blocks is a pretty effective way to
> boost geocoding accuracy with minimal data.  Though it works better in a
> US-style block system than in, say, rural areas of the UK :)

Some parts of the US are pretty crazy too. My favourite though is a
scheme I saw in Dallas (and I'm sure exists elsewhere) where the
numbers are independent of the street, and uniquely identify a house
within some region. So a tiny cul-de-sac can have street numbers in
the thousands, and an address can effectively be "41029 Dallas".

> Splitting streets may fall into the area where the edit gets more complex
> than we want to support (at least for the first release).  But yes, there is
> an issue there, depending on how farsighted the person was who originally
> traced the street :)

Speaking as a tracer, it's very hard to guess where to break a street.
You don't want to break them too short either, because then people
down the track are more likely to only label half the street...

Steve