[OSM-talk] A thought on bot edits

[Christoph Hormann]

On Monday 02 October 2017, Martin Koppenhoefer wrote:
>
> yes, keeping a lot of additional tags for a huge amount of objects in
> the main db would still be a burden on everyone working with the
> planet file or geographic extracts, so it seems logical to
> externalize the bot-tags. But how would you link one db to the other?
> If people don't see those tags (or only by request), their edits will
> erode the information in this external db (e.g. by splitting ways,
> deleting and redrawing parts, combining ways, etc.). What about
> versions, will there be different versions of the same object in the
> main db and this bot db? Is this a serious suggestion or just another
> way of saying there are too many automated activities going on?

It is a serious idea although i don't seriously expect this to be 
implemented any time soon.  Less for technical reasons as you mentioned 
but for social reasons.  A huge part of the interest in making bot 
edits stems from the idea to have the OSM community as cheap labour to 
clean up after the bots and if you remove that incentive a lot of 
motivation for making bot edits vanishes.

Linking a separate bot editing database to the main OSM database is not 
that difficult in principle as long as we are only talking about tag 
modifications on the bot side.  You would simply have a separate and 
separately versioned 'bot tags' object for every object that has bot 
tags.  Of course if bots should also be able to make geometry edits you 
would need rules for that - like bots may only edit geometries that 
have no tag starting with something other than 'bot:' and that are not 
member of a way or relation with tags other than 'bot:*'.  This would 
then essentially mean any geometry edits by bots stay within the bot 
database which would make things easier (you would have a 'bot tags' 
table plus supplemental bot only geometries tables).

That is of course all theoretical.  The more likely scenarios what will 
happen if bot editing activities spread even further are probably

a) That more and more craft mappers get fed up with bots messing with 
their work and manual editing activity declines overall -> OSM transits 
into a primarily bot maintained database.
b) The craft mappers get fed up with the bots and decide to separate out 
their work instead of that of the bots in form of some protection 
(could be as simple as adding a 'bot=no' tag to features allowing 
mappers to indicate 'bots may not touch this object i have just 
mapped').

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/