[OSM-talk] The future of bugs in OSM

[Gary68]

good morning,

i like the idea although i agree with frederik that maybe not everything
can be done inside one application.

a few ideas and facts and thoughts

- today every week i provide ~30.000 bugs for germany. they are only
published on my web, linked in the wiki and occasionally i post to the
forum or the talk-de list
- what i see is that lots of people care for their area. but lots of
bugs are outside their scope. what i want to say is: how do we get
people to repair the other bugs? ok, competition might be one thing. i
also provide lists of similar bugs. so if you are really bored you can
work on them.

- for bugs that are reported again and again... very simple. the new
application should be able to show remarks for spots.

- i would need a possibility to bulk upload my data and i need to be
able to tag the entries. furthermore i need an api call to remove all
bugs tagged with a certain tag. since i will upload a new set of bugs
all week and my bugs don't have ids.

i created a wiki page for "Meta OSB"
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Meta_OSB
( if you want to rename it, please do!)

please add wishes and other things there...


cheers 

gerhard
gary68



Am Mittwoch, den 01.07.2009, 15:22 +0100 schrieb SteveC:
> 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
> 
> _______________________________________________
> talk mailing list
> talk at openstreetmap.org
> http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk