[OSM-talk] Beginning with contribution

[Andy Townsend]

On 05/08/2016 07:56, Abhishek Gupta wrote:
>
> 1. First of all, is OOP being used in the project? Can I have support 
> the project in a way it improves my OOP skills?

Yes, lots of the software are OSM is OO based (and so is pretty much 
everywhere else in the world today - after all, even OO COBOL is a thing 
http://www.objs.com/x3h7/oocobol.htm )

> If yes,
> 2. What are the easiest ways to start contributing? (this is the first 
> time I am trying to contribute toward a open source project)

The main page of the OSM wiki

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Main_Page

has a section on "how to develop and use the platform" 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Develop .  There are lots of links there.


>
> PS :-
> I am third year computer science undergraduate. I have done courses in 
> Database Systems, Object Oriented Programming, Data Structure and 
> Algorithms. Will I be requiring background in anything else to get 
> started?


A couple of other thoughts...

There's a mailing list for "development" stuff over at 
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev .  I'd also mention IRC - 
see http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/IRC - there's a global #osm 
channel on OFTC and also a #osm-dev for development and day to day 
server admin stuff.

The wiki has a "top 10 tasks" list over at 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Top_Ten_Tasks .  That's probably 
worth a read.

There's a help site at https://help.openstreetmap.org/ .  That covers 
more than just development stuff, but you may find answers to questions 
there.

There are various test servers, so if you're doing anything with OSM's 
main API please don't write test data to the live server. There's a dev 
API at http://api06.dev.openstreetmap.org/ (among others) that you can 
use for testing.


Finally, I'd make a couple of organisational comments...

OSM isn't really an "organised" project in that there isn't one big 
github repository with everything in it and one main site that everyone 
uses.  You'll probably struggle to find links between stuff.  For 
example, I've linked to the main OSM sites above, but JOSM (one of the 
main OSM editors, written in Java) has its own site over at 
https://josm.openstreetmap.de/ , with its own bug tracker, releases 
etc.  The software used to convert OSM data for use with Garmin 
handhelds is mkgmap, over at http://www.mkgmap.org.uk/ - again, separate 
releases, documentation, mailing list etc.

OSM at its heart is just a big pile of XML data maintained by a 
community of mappers.  It's not really a "computer science" project in 
that sense (though of course lots of software is used by OSM and by 
OSM's users).  Because there are so many contributors, data consumers 
need to constantly think about how to deal with keys and values that 
they might not expect, though 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Elements (and linked pages) should 
describe the XML structure OK.

Best Regards (and good luck),

Andy