[OSM-talk] Student project ideas?

[Matthew Newton]

Hi,

A lecturer I know (Computer Science) is wondering if there are any
things in OSM that could be used as the basis for student final
year projects. The projects run from about October to April, so it's
not a quick fix for anything, but maybe something like investigating
routing might be one? Any ideas I can pass on? Can't guarantee anything
good will come out of them, of course, but it might be useful.

Things (not necessarily good things!) I can think of quickly:

  Map routing (Dijkstra, etc) that gives useful driving directions

  Convert the database and JOSM to use nodes and paths

  Distributed database for OSM that offers speed and resilience

  Distributed web system for hosting tiles such that servers can
    go away without browsers noticing (peer-to-peer maybe?)

  JOSM plugin to automatically map areas based on the Yahoo imagery
    (some sort of image processing to detect roads)

  Software and algorithms for automatically creating optimal maps
    from GPS data (i.e. using "just the right number" of nodes) and
    auto merging with existing data.

  Automatic real-time mapping application (laptop in car, passenger
    just has to type in street names when prompted? Speech recognition?!)

  OCR of street signs when pictures loaded into JOSM? (maybe not! ;-) )

They need to be projects, so "fix trac bugs m to n" is probably not
good unless bug X is a particularly big one ;). A selection of issues with
a common theme might be OK. Open-ended stuff can be good so the student
can choose the way they will work at the problem, hopefully with
reference to the wider community too, of course.

Any ideas or refinements of the above?

Thanks!

-- 
Matthew