[OSM-talk] track upload improvements

[Stefan Baebler]

Zivjo!

During the upload there are people involved, so mistakes are going to 
happen (I know, lame excuse :))

By mistake i uploaded zipped ozi explorer track
http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/stefanb/traces/18121
which was never imported (neither originally, nor now during reimport), 
so i uploaded the correct gpx version soon afterwards:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/stefanb/traces/18167

1) What to do with these faulty uploads? Should uploader be able to 
delete them? Or at least tag it with "DeleteMe" tag so that an admin can 
do it later? Now it seems impossible to edit tags after an upload. I've 
noticed that quite many track didnt get imported during reimport 
(points=0), but didn't investigate them in detail.

2) Users are converting their tracks from various formats to GPX, which 
might represent a slight obstacle in volunteer participation itself. 
Besides that, the conversion is lossy, loosing data such as number of 
satellites used for the fix, sometimes time, gps device model. What if 
there is a bug discovered later on in the conversion software? It would 
be easier to reconvert and reimport such tracks than to persuade people 
to reupload the original track (or even convert it with the latest 
converter before doing so). Also having a variety of formats uploaded 
would improve credibility of these tracks a notch. The various formats 
could be automatically converted to GPX using server side gpsbabel. If 
sometime later we decide that having some more track data might be 
useful (eg number of satellites) It could be easily retrieved from the 
original files (nmea logs at least, probably also others), as 
reimporting those would be possible. server side conversion could also 
eliminate duplicates without altering the originally uploaded data.

3) People sometimes don't tag their tracks correctly (either they forget 
  places they have been to, or just tag endpoints, or they enter the 
places into description field instead into "tags" field). Partial 
solution is to rename the field "tags" into "tags (places)" in the 
upload page.
Ideally it would also be possible to list traces by position (eg using 
trackfile bounding box or finding them by trackpoints itself.

enjoy the day,
     Stefan