[OSM-talk] Users' activity feeds

François Schnell francois.schnell at gmail.com
Sun Aug 24 12:39:41 BST 2008


Hello,

I also agree with the necessity to have more informations/API/alerts about
user's activity to monitor the quality/mistakes and I believe to be more
credible to the outside world.

I use OSM Mapper and OSM Aware and "OSMxapi/node RSS feed" but for me it's
not sufficent.

What I really need is an alert (RSS, mail or other...) when the elements
(ways, nodes, areas) I've created or contributed to are modified.

Why I think it is important?

Because the elements I've contributed to are the one I know, I've seen them
with my eyes, otherwise I wouldn't have mapped them.
But I don't necesseraly know all the elements (ways, nodes...) 'around' them
and I don't have time to check all of them in a region to see if I've
contributed to it (have some knowledge about them), or not.

If I had such an automatic alert (on my contributions) I could easily check
and be in one of the three situation:

1) I know the addition/modification is right (cool to see the community
effort, encourages me to map more, we are not alone :) )
2) I don't know if the addition is right but it's possible (maybe I could
double check one day eventually)
3) I sure know it is a mistake (this motorway i take eveyday is not a
river...). I must do something about it now (contact the mapper and correct
the mistake)

Right now i can randomly see some annoying unintentional mistakes made on my
contributions. Each time I spot one I ask myself how many more I didn't see,
these thougts don't encourage me.  We know we are mapping facts
(geographical informations), not doing art. We obvisoulsy should do
eveything we can to ensure the facts are and stay right or improve in
detail. Otherwise that doesn't fully satisfy me and I prefered to reduce my
mapping contributions to OSM (and contribute more to other projects in the
meantime).

I'm sure OSM will find a way. I'm still utterly amazed at what OSM achieved
(especially when you understand how much more technically complex it is than
a simple "wikipedia").
But I believe improvements in this field should be a priority and should
happen better sooner than latter. The longer OSM waits, the more mistakes
will accumulate, the more people will be discourage, the less credible the
quality of the database will be to the external world.

My 2 cents (for what it's worth).
francois

PS:
When I've developed OSMaware I quickly tried to do such an RSS feed (as
decribed above) but I didn't find an easy way to do it 'reasonnably' without
probing the history of all the elements... So I gave-up on this.
I also added it as feature request on the OSM Mapper wiki page but i didn't
see any answer there either.
I'm having a quick look at the "OSM Protocol Version 0.6" draft, maybe the
"Querying by user" for change sets will help in the futur (if it is what I
imagine).

---

On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 8:44 PM, Ian Dees <ian.dees at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 10:26 AM, Nic Roets <nroets at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Sat, Aug 23, 2008 at 12:18 AM, Ian Dees <ian.dees at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > 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.
>>
>> There's a simple trick to achieve this : XOR or subtractive rendering.
>> Relatively simple to implement with slippy map tiles and desktop
>> renderers.
>>
>
> It sounds like there's interest in an RSS feed or some other, non-graphical
> method of communicating that information. The graphical approach on a map is
> definitely neat, but I think an RSS feed or e-mail alert would be even more
> useful.
>
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>
>
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