[OSM-talk] Building a free/open reviews community w/ OSM support

[Michał Brzozowski]

Have you devised any robust algorithm for linking OSM primitives to
objects in the external database? In general case, it seems really
hard to track objects as they get converted from nodes to areas, or
decide whether given OSM feature is no longer representing some entity
in the external database. On top of that, people do many stupid things
while mapping which could baffle even a sophisticated program.
A framework / API for performing such linking would be of great
interest, as it could enable many applications to exist on top of OSM
- recognizing that not everything belongs to OSM.

Regarding the idea, I reckon it may not scale well, if at all. Weeding
out spammers needs constant attention, and community moderation is
prone to the Sybil attacks. This may be less of a problem on sites
such as OSM or Wikipedia where data needs verifiability that or
another way (so in order to gain trust you have to do actual work).
Reviews are inherently subjective. Not to mention any legal BS one may
get from business owners.

Michał

On Sat, Aug 6, 2016 at 12:55 AM, Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm working on this project:
>
> https://lib.reviews/
>
> The front page explains the goal: to build a free, open and non-profit
> community focused on reviews. Review content is under CC-BY-SA while
> the codebase is under CC-0.
>
> Basic functionality to write reviews is there (we identify things to
> review by URL for now), but there's a lot more to come. See the
> screencast on the front page for what is working so far. Language is a
> first-class citizen: both the UI _and_ all content (including review
> texts) are fully translatable. The site should be mobile-friendly, and
> work without JavaScript.
>
> I've long been involved with Wikimedia and am also a big fan of OSM;
> these projects are guiding me in terms of the philosophy and
> principles behind lib.reviews. See https://lib.reviews/terms which
> should give some insight into the project philosophy.
>
> I've noticed that having reviews associated with OSM data has been
> proposed before, e.g. [1], and so I am hoping that OSM and lib.reviews
> can become good friends :). The OSM POI data seems like a good way to
> bootstrap reviews of restaurants, businesses, and the like. If anyone
> wants to already get involved in investigating how this could be made
> to work, I'd be more than happy to schedule a video call to walk you
> through the codebase and architecture.
>
> I'm also happy to answer questions on-list or off-list, and if you'd
> like an invite-code to play with the functionality that's there so
> far, shoot me an offlist note or follow the instructions on the site.
> I believe free/open reviews are a critical component of the free
> culture ecosystem, alongside maps, encyclopedic content, and other
> information. If you agree, hope you'll check it out!
>
> Warmly,
>
> Erik
>
> [1] http://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=27837
>
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