[OSM-talk] OsmNote - system for keeping and sharing notes on your OSM surveying

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Sat, Dec 02, 2006 at 01:23:59PM +0100, Dan Karran wrote:
> Nick,
> 
> On 12/2/06, Nick Whitelegg <nick150971 at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> > Would like to announce the first prototype version of OsmNote - a system for
> > keeping notes on your surveying, for later use by yourself and others. (For
> > example, after surveying you could remind yourself that there are still a
> > load of cul-de-sacs in an area which need doing)
> 
> Nice idea
> 
> [snip]
> 
> > Also the search will only work in the UK at present, and it's only tested on
> > Firefox (it definitely won't work in IE)
> 
> Seems to work fine in Safari too (still gives a debugging popup of the
> SQL statement though)
> 
> > It's available at
> > http://www.free-map.org.uk/osmnote/
> >
> > It stores the notes as a georss feed, which can take a bbox parameter:
> > http://www.free-map.org.uk/osmnote/georss.php
> 
> How do I specify the bounding box? After adding a point in the Isle of
> Man (Latitude: 54.2785 Longitude: -4.4748) I tried loading
> http://www.free-map.org.uk/osmnote/georss.php?BBOX=54,-5,55,-4
> but it didn't have any articles in...

'bbox' is canonically minlon,minlat,maxlon,maxlat:

http://www.free-map.org.uk/osmnote/georss.php?BBOX=-5,54,-4,55

Is the "mountain road needs doing" yours? :)

> > Ideas for further development welcome. One possibility is to be able to add
> > the notes through JOSM, as then you could do it at the same time as you are
> > creating new ways.
> 
> Would it make sense to store these as nodes in the OSM database, and
> subscribe to nodes for your map that are tagged with 'user_note' or
> something? 

The problem with this is implementation. In order to do this, you'd have
to query the entire bounding box for OSM data -- with a one degree
example like above, this could return in 'hours', or 'never'. 

> Then they'd be available to people using JOSM and other
> editors, and would be available in different interfaces like OsmNote
> too. 

Fortunately, any well documented API has this property.

> Though to be able to do that it'd need to be possible to
> subscribe to items in the main OSM database that were tagged with a
> certain key (+value).

Based on the current database schema, this is difficult to implement --
and changing the OSM database can be difficult because there's so much
data in it that it's hard to do anything with. 

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
MetaCarta