[OSM-talk] Users' activity feeds

[Hugh Barnes]

On Saturday 23 August 2008 09:12:36 Dan Karran wrote:

> > Am 23.08.2008 um 00:18 schrieb "Ian Dees" <ian.dees at gmail.com>:
> > How about an activity feed for a certain bounding box area? I think this,
> > in combination with the user-specific activity log, would be very useful.

That and Dan's original suggestion are both good ideas and needed features. 
Ian's has occurred to me and also others in my circle independently.

> On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 11:22 PM, John07 <osm at jonas-krueckel.de> wrote:
> > Look at the ito! Osm mapper
>

This still seems to be limited to Europe from their website, and I find the 
signup requirement a minor barrier, though I have no objections to doing it.

> OSM Mapper <http://www.itoworld.com/static/osmmapper> does do a great
> job of showing user activity, filterable, and all exportable in CSV.
> It's always limited to specific areas though, as I understand it, and
> designed to show relatively raw data. On the other hand, the feeds I
> was contemplating would be more like summaries grouping changes
> together for a period of time, and limited by user, but they could
> also perform the same role for given areas.

I'm personally fine getting every change rather than a "digest". I'd probably 
only like ways, areas, and nodes with user-defined metadata that are not part 
of ways. That is, I don't want every uninteresting point making up a way 
unless it's significant.

And now my original contribution to the thread. I'm doing it with the wiki 
apparently down, so I've been unable to confirm a lot of what I think is 
true.

If such feeds were to be provided through the project's infrastructure, it 
shouldn't be too hard to do XSL transforms from a bounded area dataset 
download [citation needed]. All of the required metadata seems to be there. 
(Maybe not enough of history). I'll try to find some time tonight (Saturday) 
to do this and hopefuly get back either way tomorrow.

I realise there would be questions of architecture before such a tool could be 
deployed on a server (load, caching, possible size limits, frequency limits), 
but it sounds like a fun exercise to start on.

I'm not sure what the easiest way to query a user's activity would be, 
probably the API. (Again, wiki down). The bounded area dataset might also be 
best obtained through API calls.

Cheers