[Openstreetmap] street level ontology

[Matt Amos]

On Wednesday 17 November 2004 13:17, SteveC wrote:
> Matt was thinking of an application sitting locally on your machine
> that you'd use. I think this is completely broken as you want to
> people to just be able to edit things off the bat - downloading
> random applications will put a lot of people off.

no, i completely agree that downloading random apps will put people 
off, but i can't see any other way of implementing the necessary 
functionality with reasonable lack of latency.

java is nice for small edits, but you can't expect someone to turn up 
randomly, having had no contact and download what might be several 
megabytes of tracks and existing routes and java .class'es to make a 
small edit. obviously, we'd restrict the downloads to as little as 
truly necessary, but i have a feeling that would be a lot.

> So as a least worst solution, I'm guessing applet. But at the very
> least the thing can be app-neutral.

my suggestion was to standardise the access to tracks & database data 
so that if i write my app, you write your app, someone writes an app 
in brainfuck (just to show you can) they will all interoperate 
nicely.

the infrastructure around the data needs to be app-neutral, but to 
have certain guarantees. one is that the end user should have to 
agree at some point that the data his is submitting is his own and is 
suitable for redistribution under CC with SA, or whatever its gonna 
be. we don't want anyone submitting MasterMap and then the OS 
shutting us down.

also, i thought it would be good for the user system to be embedded in 
the database, so that users can switch between apps without needing 
several logins.

then i thought we could use gpg to have people sign their uploaded 
tracks, but maybe thats a level too far.

cya,

matt
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