[OSM-talk] The future of bugs in OSM

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

SteveC wrote:
> 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.

I believe that the types of bugs one can look for are quite different. 
You'd have to build a very good system if it is to be able to capture 
all kinds of bugs - don't think that simply having something like 
lat/lon/text is enough, because some bugs might be relevant for a whole 
area, or you might have a "two nearby streets share the same name" bug 
which points to two ways rather than one location, etc etc

Not saying it can't be done but if you want to replace the various bug 
systems then you need to be able to do what they can do or it is a step 
backwards.

I'm also wary of the centralistic "let's set up a database and have 
everyone upload their data to us" approach. Maybe keeping true to your 
"clearinghouse" idea the central service should *only* know that there 
is some other service that has found a bug in a certain location, and 
when the user wants to know more, the other service is interrogated 
through an API. The other service might, for example, guide the user 
through an automatic fixing process for certain types of bugs, or offer 
things like "find similar bugs in the vicinity" or so. Plus, every coder 
could contribute to something like that in the language(s) he prefers, 
and without having to ask for his functionality to be included in some 
central service.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"