Steve, All good ideas, as data becomes ever more densely and confusingly packed (just open Potlach in a completed Germany city!) the OSB site offers a nice way for Human Beings to get involved. Three thoughts:
1 - Being able to show which logged-in users submitted bugs would be a great help for me. I have a couple of people who add OSB bugs for street numbers and other minor fixes and since I trust them I put that data straight in when they put their name to it without having to go out and check, but accounts of course make it much more trustworthy. 2 - Further down the line people should be able to attach photos, as I'd love to do something like a call for random people to submit cycle parking / street numbers where I can't trust their word but could trust a well taken photo, and (related to 1) could contact them if it's unclear. 3 - Make it easy to integrate with other web sites, e.g. we nicked the Mappa Mercia OSB stuff for http://map.oneplanetsutton.org/openstreetbugs.html Cheers, Tom On Wednesday 01 Jul 2009 15:22:32 SteveC wrote: > 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@openstreetmap.org > http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk