[OSM-talk] Improving community within the OSM site

openstreetmap at jammeh.co.uk openstreetmap at jammeh.co.uk
Wed May 24 18:06:57 BST 2006


Etienne wrote:
 > On 5/23/06, Erik Johansson <erjohan at gmail.com> wrote:
 >> On 5/23/06, Etienne <80n80n at gmail.com> wrote:

 >> It would be very nice to be able to see who is logged in and mapping
 >> at the moment, and some kind of chat/webforum. I'm dying to know who
 >> made those segments 4 km from my house, but I can't.
 >
 > It would be very useful to have some information about who has created
 > a segment and also the edit history for that segment.  This is already
 > in the database but is not exposed through any API.
 >
 > To avoid exposing a real identity (well actually a real email address)
 > the alias should be sent in place of the email address.  This is
 > already defined for the tracks upload, so the only problem seems to be
 > the need for a programmer to write an API get the history, tools can
 > then be written to use/display this information.

I was thinking about this recently, and one suggestion I have (though 
I'm afraid I don't have the knowledge to implement it without learning 
java a bit more) is that perhaps JOSM can allow default tags to be created.
For instance, I could set "Created by" to be "jammeh" (if duplicate 
created tags are allowed?) have a "Created on" set to the timestamp of 
the upload. To extend this perhaps a "modified by" and a "modified on" 
to show the (last only?) edit that was performed.
It strikes me also that the last edit info might be useful in 
conjunction with some auditing options to help remove the almost 
inevitable defacement/spam etc when it arrives.

To add yet more suggestions for JOSM, perhaps an audit option would be 
good, for instance, if I download a relatively small area I'm working 
on, highlighting or listing some elements that don't match a specified 
criteria would help ensure consistent entries. For example check that 
all ways have a "highway=something" entry, or that all segments are part 
of a way. I guess I can probably work out how to stick some of this 
functionality, but I'm a bit busy on non OSMish stuff just atm so won't 
be learning what's going on just yet!

jam




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