[Openstreetmap] Plans for osm-editor

[Nick Whitelegg]

Hello everyone,

Very quiet on the list this week! :-)

Those of you interested in osm-editor, thought I'd let you know of my
plans. Now I know what can and cannot be done with AJAX for a web
interface, thought I'd tidy up osm-editor a bit.

At the moment osm-editor simply allows you to segment off a GPS track,
however I plan to alter it so it can download online data - in the short
term this will be Freemap data, but, when the new API is ready, it will be
OpenStreetMap data. This will allow, for instance, newly-surveyed paths and
roads from a GPS to be connected, using the osm-editor interface, to
existing paths and roads in the online data.

The plan I had to start off with was a simple "check in, check out" system:

1. User selects an area of the database to "check out" roads, streets,
paths etc.
2. Roads, streets, paths etc from the database sent back as XML (GPX)
within an HTTP response
3. osm-editor parses the GPX and allows user to manipulate the data.
4. When the user has finished editing, the user can send the online data
(possibly modified) back to the online database, together with
newly-surveyed data from the GPS - the "check in" process.

On the server-side, for my test case (to test the effectiveness of this
system) I intend to "lock" checked-out data until it's checked-in again, to
prevent people editing the same data twice. Obviously some more
sophisticated, subversion-like system could be developed, but I'm not sure
if I will have the time; and when connected to osm, the wikiness will need
to be considered.

Nick