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

[joost schouppe]

Keeping OSM and an external database linked is no mean feat. Say you load a
McDonalds POI to your database and someone reviews it. But then a mapper
comes along and changes the node to a line. Upon the next update of your
POI database, your review will not find the object it linked to before,
because it no longer exists.

Here are some possible solutions:
- generalize the link between review and object to something like "this
review is for an abject more or less called McDonalds which is more or less
in this location"
- link to object IDs, but have an intelligent algorithm or some
crowdsourcing decide if the review still belongs to the same OSM object
upon update
- add an external ID to OSM. This would be analogue to the current wikidata
tag.

Though all three approaches have huge problems, I personally think only the
third option would be viable for a project like this. In practice, it would
mean your website would have to write tags to the OSM database. That is
easy to get wrong and would probably meet resistance from the community. I
would like to see the wikidata model generalized, where you have a tag like
external_id:wikidata and external_id:lib_reviews . To minimize polluting
OSM with unnecessary tags, only objects which have a review in your system
should get the tag.

There are some interesting reactions on a diary entry I wrote on this long
ago: http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/joost%20schouppe/diary/34328

2016-08-08 1:38 GMT+02:00 Erik Moeller <eloquence at gmail.com>:

> On Fri, Aug 5, 2016 at 7:48 PM, Pine W <wiki.pine at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi Pine,
>
> Nice to run into you here!
>
> > Hod do you plan to develop readership for this site? Yelp seems to have a
> > commanding lead.
>
> To begin with, I think the most important question is whether this is
> something of importance to the free culture movement -- people like us
> who care about works being free to share and build upon, without
> control by any single organization, and with the technology being
> re-usable by others along with the content.
>
> I personally obviously think it's an important problem to work on --
> user-created reviews are pervasive, important and typically
> proprietary, along with the sites that host them. Moreover, there are
> obvious conflicts of interest at play that can be mitigated through a
> more open approach without a commercial motive by the site operator.
> Finally, I hope that we can ultimately add useful metadata beyond just
> "is this a good product", e.g., about  a company's environmental or
> labor record.
>
> If enough other people agree, then the answer to your question is not
> what _I_ plan to do :). If we don't care about this problem as a
> movement (which might legitimately be because other things are more
> important), then it won't get solved.
>
> With that preamble, I personally have a few thoughts on that, of
> course. For now I'm building out core functionality; once that's done,
> I want to look into meeting the needs of specialized communities that
> aren't currently being well-served by commercial players. lib.reviews
> already has the notion of teams:
>
> https://lib.reviews/teams
>
> If anyone reading this would like to start a team to review things
> that already have a matching OSM community, for example, let me know
> and we'll get that started. I also want to make reviews easily
> embeddable, Disqus style, so that folks who run small web shops and
> such can use our software with minimal effort.
>
> There's more, but I don't want to take up too much space on the OSM
> list with not obviously OSM-related aspects of the project, and invite
> folks who want to brainstorm further about it in general to subscribe
> to the lib.reviews list, here:
>
> http://www.freelists.org/list/lib.reviews
>
> Cheers,
>
> Erik
>
> _______________________________________________
> talk mailing list
> talk at openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
>



-- 
Joost @
Openstreetmap <http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/joost%20schouppe/> |
Twitter <https://twitter.com/joostjakob> | LinkedIn
<https://www.linkedin.com/pub/joost-schouppe/48/939/603> | Meetup
<http://www.meetup.com/OpenStreetMap-Belgium/members/97979802/>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20160808/575ed147/attachment-0001.html>