[Talk-GB] Two new tools: 'Ghosts' and 'Survey Me'

[Robert Whittaker (OSM lists)]

On 9 June 2018 at 16:02, Artur R. Czechowski <arturcz at gmail.com> wrote:
> How to report false positives to the 3rd party data? Tait's Pharmacy (BD18
> 3HZ) certainly does not exist at mentioned location. Neither there is any
> track it existed before or would be exist soon.
> http://robert.mathmos.net/osm/survey/#18/53.8361/-1.7862

That's an interesting one. The official registration page for it is
https://www.pharmacyregulation.org/registers/pharmacy/registrationnumber/1109439
, and it looks like thie is the place: http://www.taitspharmacy.co.uk/
. If there's no sign of it on the ground at that address, I would
guess that it may be an online only pharmacy.

I quick read online, suggests that there are two types of pharmacies
that can be registered -- the traditional type and
distance-selling-only. The former can do online/distance-selling stuff
too, but the latter is restricted from delivering "essential services"
(e.g. prescriptions) to people in person at their premises (though
they can provide other in-person services). If this is correct, then
we probably shouldn't be listed the distance-selling-only pharmacies
as amenity=pharmacy in OSM. Unfortunately the data from the General
Pharmaceutical Council doesn't seem to distinguish the two. Does
anyone have any ideas/thoughts here?

> How often data in your tool are refreshed? I surveyed a couple of postboxes
> and updated OSM data just recently.

The OSM data is updated roughly once a week. The third party data is
updated less frequently, and is sometimes constrained by how often the
third party provides updates. Details can be found at
http://robert.mathmos.net/osm/updates.cgi which is now linked from the
Survey Me page at http://robert.mathmos.net/osm/survey/ .

> As you have gathered those data it is possible to provide some API to access
> it? Personally I would be glad to see them as StreetComplete quests.

There are geojson and GPX downloads available from
http://robert.mathmos.net/osm/survey/ for each rectangle once you zoom
in. You can hack the URLs in the obvious way if you want to grab
multiple sets of data. There are also some download options (often on
a per postal district basis) on many of the individual tools (though
some of the files labelled as geojson are actually js files defining a
geojson object). I haven't got anything to get the full data for each
class, though I could look at this if there was interest.

As far as StreetComplete is concerned, I'd looked at that before. As
far as I could see though, what they're after there is things where
users can answer a yes/no question or input a number or short string,
in order to update the tagging on an existing OSM object. I think this
makes most of the issues in Survey Me unsuitable.

One exception that springs to mind is post boxes without a ref=* tag,
where you could have a StreetComplete quest that asks "What is the box
number of this Post Box?" We'd then need a way of tagging the negative
options of "Royal Mail Box without a visible ref" and "Non-Royal Mail
box". The former could be "ref:visible=no". but I'm a bit stumped as
to what to do with the latter case. (This includes a handful of
"private" boxes for public use, which are not official Royal Mail post
boxes, but ones where the operator offers to re-post anything they
find in there as a service to their visitors. There is/was one like
this in my local Sainsbury's for example.) My first thought was to use
the operator=* tag. If this is anything but "Royal Mail" then we could
treat the box as a private box and ignore it. However, use of the
operator tag on Royal Mail post boxes probably isn't consistent enough
for that to be a good idea:
http://robert.mathmos.net/osm/postboxes/osm-operator.html . Does
anyone have any thoughts, or have any experience setting up
StreetComplete quests?

Robert.