[OSM-talk] The future of bugs in OSM

Tom Chance tom at acrewoods.net
Wed Jul 1 19:38:43 BST 2009


Steve,

All good ideas, as data becomes ever more densely and confusingly packed (just 
open Potlach in a completed Germany city!) the OSB site offers a nice way for 
Human Beings to get involved. Three thoughts:

1 - Being able to show which logged-in users submitted bugs would be a great 
help for me. I have a couple of people who add OSB bugs for street numbers and 
other minor fixes and since I trust them I put that data straight in when they 
put their name to it without having to go out and check, but accounts of 
course make it much more trustworthy.

2 - Further down the line people should be able to attach photos, as I'd love 
to do something like a call for random people to submit cycle parking / street 
numbers where I can't trust their word but could trust a well taken photo, and 
(related to 1) could contact them if it's unclear.

3 - Make it easy to integrate with other web sites, e.g. we nicked the Mappa 
Mercia OSB stuff for http://map.oneplanetsutton.org/openstreetbugs.html

Cheers,
Tom

On Wednesday 01 Jul 2009 15:22:32 SteveC wrote:
> I've been thinking a bit about how bugs work in OSM.
>
> I really like the way OSB works
>
> 	http://openstreetbugs.appspot.com/
>
> But it's closed source afaik and doesn't have an API. It uses human
> input. new OSB is cool and tries to fix some of this
>
> 	http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:Emka/new_OSB
>
> I like keepright
>
> 	http://keepright.ipax.at/
>
> But it's more automated.
>
> Here's my vision for how bugs should work.
>
> You go to http://bugs.openstreetmap.org/
>
> There's a big map of bugs which looks similar to OSB. It doesn't know
> who you are and drops you in to beginner mode which shows bugs that
> are relevant to you - human entered stuff say. There is an
> intermediate mode which shows a slide which, when slid, shows more
> bugs. So at the low end human entered stuff, but at the high you get
> every single fixme from OSM. Then there is expert mode which looks
> like keepright, and you can click various things on and off.
>
> How do you enter bugs? There are two ways. As a human on bugs.osm..
> www.openstreetmap.org you can click a little green plus like OSB has on the
> map, or
> potlatch will let you do it too.
>
> But, and this is key, it also has a RESTful API for mass uploading of
> bugs.
>
> We need to do two things - unify the various bug systems and expose
> more of the bugs.
>
> To give you an example there are tons of bugs in the US, but there is
> no systematic way to fix them, or even begin fixing them. There are
> some good HOWTOs on the wiki on the actual individual details of how
> to fix a bridge connected to the road beneath it, but no big list of
> such bridges or where they are. We need to make this systematic.
>
> 	http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/TIGER_fixup/Over_Connectedness
>
> Why is my system better than OSB or keepright?
>
> OSB with a simple API might fly, but it's not open and not quite part
> of OSM. Keepright kind of gets there but the barrier to entry is high.
> If I want to do an import and list bugs to check, or I want to write
> my own little maplint utility to check for X or Y or Z I have to learn
> whatever language keepright is in and start hacking against a large
> codebase. Instead, bugs.openstreetmap.org would offer a really simple
> REST api to throw bugs at.
>
> I envisage it as a sort of clearing house for bugs. It will quickly
> become very useful for lots of people writing small, loosly-joined
> tools. The barrier to me writing a small bug app is low. I imagine all
> sorts of little apps writing things to submit bugs much as keepright
> or maplint sort of do now. All they have to do, is run a script to
> report the bugs from planet every week (or whatever) and keep track of
> the bug IDs and see if they're closed yet.
>
> Now on the output side I think there is a huge amount of potential.
>
> Right now people don't know where to start fixing things. You can
> point people at OSB but that is human only, or you could point them at
> keepright or maplint but then you have to fight to maintain those
> things. Instead, bugs.openstreetmap.org would be a central clearing
> house which everyone can submit to and use.
>
> To go back to that example, if someone writes a script to find all
> freeways in the USA which connect at right angles to residential roads
> and submits them through the api to bugs.openstreetmap.org then you
> have a big dataset. It becomes super fun, cool and easy to motivate
> the community and say - hey lets fix all those bugs in the US. You can
> draw graphs of the number of bugs being eaten up, show progress, make
> a leaderboard... all the things that will motivate a *lot* of people
> to fix these things. It will be so cool to be able to have many people
> working on closing bugs, I'd make it my number one slide in every talk
> I go to, saying "go to bugs.openstreetmap.org and enter or fix a bug"
> maybe I should already with OSB.
>
> Now, you can of course just write a standalone app to do that freeways
> in the US a bit like keepright is a standalone app, but having it work
> for that, then someone else enters all the bugs in Spain that they're
> interested in, someone else when they import the next GNIS or
> something, adds bugs against all the imported PoIs that they need to
> be checked, other people can just enter bugs they see.... it becomes a
> very powerful system. All it needs is a little REST api.
>
> And what's doubly great is that it's basically a weekend, if that,
> project to get started and do the simplest pieces. Then we can iterate
> it from there.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Best
>
> Steve
>
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