[OSM-talk] track upload improvements

[Tapio Sokura]

Stefan Baebler wrote:
> 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 

I just checked a couple of gpx-files I converted from NMEA. They contain 
elevations, timestamps, courses, speeds, fix types, number of satellites 
and DOP-values, in addition to lat/long. Where's the loss? True, there's 
no GPS device model in those files I checked, but it wasn't present in 
the original NMEA-data either.

> 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 

At least the gpx-files I've uploaded to osm seem to be preserved as is. 
If later there's a need to use the amount of satellites, it's just a 
matter of having the server reprocess the gpx file and extract the 
satellite information.

I'm in favor of not complicating the server side, as there are 
relatively simple tools available for users to convert their tracklogs 
to gpx prior to uploading.

   Tapio