[Openstreetmap] our little meetup today

SteveC steve at fractalus.com
Mon Mar 21 08:01:34 GMT 2005


* @ 20/03/05 11:12:41 PM jo at frot.org wrote:
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/wiki/index.php/XmlRpcInterface
> i am unsure about what to do with a point's trackid. manage that
> myself and supply an arbitrary value?

Nick and I talked about that, as he does this stuff too. I don't think
there is a good answer on how to do it. Through XMLRPC you can manage it
yourself. The GPX uploader will autoincrement your biggest trackid (in
the database) and use that.

It lets people who want to manage their tracks do so and people who
dont, the server will for you. Other ideas?


One of the things Matt and I got talking about was privacy. A uid and
track number make a unique track but I'd rather not give out uid's even
if obfuscated (but still identifiable as two people made the same
track) since you can follow them home.

Suggested solution was to hash the uid and trackid and some salt
(cryptographic term: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_%28cryptography%29 )
to get a unique number for each track.

You may still be able to figure out things about people and tracks
though, I suspect there is no real answer to this.


One thing high on my todo is to enable gzip in the HTTP XMLRPC stream,
will make everything faster.


> - We talked about road ontologies a fair bit:
>   - future extensibility is crucial
>   - readability is nice
>   
>   I think matt's ideas about annotating abstract street
>   representations (segment collections) with key-value pairs works and
>   corresponds pretty well to the RDF model i had in mind. 

Sounds good to me, but I'd add a few things.

We dicussed classes last night -> sets of predefined key value pairs
that any key-value will override but default for others to the given
classes value.

key-value can encompass 'accessible to horse' as well as 'is a B road'
so they seem sensible as an extensible classification scheme.

The other is class or key value equivalence.

We could have boundaries and if you're making a motorway in the states
it automagically becomes interstate, or autobahn in germany but I think
its more open and extensible to have for each key various equivalence
keys. That way people can use the classification they like and still be
able to use data entered under someone elses - completely extensible.

have fun,

SteveC steve at fractalus.com http://www.fractalus.com/steve/




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