[Talk-GB] OSM Analysis New Data and bot

[Peter Miller]

On 11 June 2011 09:09, Bob Kerr <openstreetmapcraigmillar at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> So the question is, who is going to come forward and write the bot, and who
> is going to come forward to write documentation.

>Any takers?

Yup! I agree that we are now at a point where we agree that not
everyone likes imports but also that not everyone likes bare sections
of the map and it does seem like the right moment for those who want
to create a bot to get on an do it.

Fyi we are doing some investigation in ITO into adding OS
VectorDistrict 'road missing' data on the OS Locator tiles or possibly
onto an alternative map layer. The aim being to make tracing of roads
easier and to highlight those road vectors which we don't have in OSM
yet. We also hope to have something to show on the 'reverse OS Locator
missing names' analysis and show up all the additional names in OSM
over the OS.

Re bots, the first 'easy win' would be to create a 'OS name bot' which
will match up unnamed roads that have a good bounding-box match with a
single OS Locator entry within the area in which the bot has been
requested to work. The bot would then make those changes and attribute
them to the user who is operation the bot (this is slightly different
from XY Bot where the bot 'is' the user). The changeset would then say
edits by OS Bot (build xxx) and the user who be the person operating
it at the time. The bot should only intervene in situations where
there is only one road and only one OS Locator entry with a similar
bounding box entry. Other situations will need to be deal with by
hand.

Needless to say the bot should add a 'surveyed:name=no' to the entry.
Also, the bot would go through 'type approval' where we try it on
small areas to start with. Users of the bot should be aware of
requests for 'OS bot exclusion zone' where contributors have requested
that it is not used in patches that they are working on.

At a later stage one might consider extending the bot to also add road
geometry but this is significantly more difficult.

Regarding documentation, my contribution is to put a lot of effort
into the wiki to improve some of the tag pages in particular to
marine/harbours and electricity supply. Hopefully someone will do work
on the Potlatch documentation.

 Regards,


Peter


> Any takers
> Cheers
> Bob
> ________________________________
> From: Richard Fairhurst <richard at systemed.net>
> To: talk-gb at openstreetmap.org
> Sent: Friday, 10 June 2011, 20:09
> Subject: Re: [Talk-GB] OSM Analysis New Data and bot
>
> Ed Avis wrote:
>> Richard Fairhurst writes:
>>>But if we were to put as much effort into marketing OSM and
>>>improving our tools as we do into writing and indeed discussing bots,
>>>the 40% areas would be fixed.
>>
>> If that were true, then it would be no contest.  Given the choice between
>> spending some effort doing an import and the same effort to recruit a huge
>> army of mappers who can cover the whole country, any sane person would
>> go for the mappers.
>
> Lemme give you an example.
>
> There are some really eloquent people on these lists. Granted, some of them
> are eloquently arguing nonsense, but nonetheless, some really eloquent
> people who can explain things lucidly, entertainingly, and convincingly.
>
> So why does our documentation suck so hard?
>
> Writing good docs is not easy, but given the right people, it is certainly
> no more difficult than writing a competent bot. Certainly I know which I'd
> find easier (which makes it a bit ironic that I do programming for OSM
> rather than writing, but hey).
>
> There is approximately one person in the entire world who has made an effort
> on documentation - stand up and take a bow, Richard Weait - but he can't do
> it all by himself. And here we are all merrily talking about bots, while
> every day dozens of people are signing up for OSM, staring at the screen,
> and thinking "um, what the fuck do I do *now*?".
>
> So how do we start to convert some of those sign-up-but-never-edit people
> into real mappers? Get a group together. Have a mailing list (private if
> needs be) to discuss what you're doing. Find an install of Dokuwiki or
> Wordpress or whatever turns you on. Write some really good,
> beginner-friendly docs. Start small: an English-language guide to
> contributing basic mapping to OSM. (Bells and whistles and
> internationalisation can come later.)
>
> This little step would do a whole lot more for OSM globally than some street
> names in Dumfries & Galloway ever will. And you can start it today.
>
> cheers
> Richard
>
>
>
> --
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