OpenStreetMap
Wanted: Simple amenity describer and foursquare style Q&A process
Posted by CloCkWeRX on 20 September 2015 in English.Many of the mobile editing tools are aimed at the more experienced end of the spectrum. The online tools are almost universally aimed at the full editing experience. I think however there’s a lot of value that can be extracted with the right questions; in a much more constrained use case.
For example, Foursquare will encourage users to rate attributes of a place they’ve checked into, like “Is X good for lunch?”
We’ve got similar small focus editors - things like http://ae.osmsurround.org/ae/index - but we really lack any idea of “does the user know much about the place to answer questions?”
https://developer.foursquare.com/docs/users/checkins does give us one means to ask for this; as did previous versions of the facebook API - I’m not entirely clear now that posts being tagged with ‘locations’ would allow you to understand a similar kind of relationship.
http://openbeermap.github.io/ almost perfectly describes the kind of experience I’d interested in - it has a lot of domain specific knowledge and guides the user into authoring the brewery tag correctly; ditto http://openwheelmap.org/ - both could be tremendously made more useful if coupled with user history and focused data enhancement tools.
Discussion
Comment from mvexel on 20 September 2015 at 21:02
OpenGeoQuestions should be interesting for this!
Comment from CloCkWeRX on 21 September 2015 at 04:31
I hadn’t seen that I don’t think, but in the exact right direction! Wonder if the source is avail; demo isn’t too working for me right now.
Comment from Harry Wood on 21 September 2015 at 10:33
The Kort game http://play.kort.ch is designed to be asking various simple questions. Maybe it could do with some more interesting questions related restaurants and pubs (making it more foursquare-like) For me it’s just asking relatively uninteresting questions about name language settings on things and names of service roads, so some questions about extra POI tagging might liven it up a bit.
Of course WheelMap http://wheelmap.org/en/ is everybody’s favourite example of an nice narrow focussed tagging app. Essentially it’s asking one question… “how’s the wheelchair access?”.
Likewise coffeedex https://www.mapbox.com/blog/coffeedex/ just asking “how much does coffee cost?”
onosm http://onosm.org is for adding new things to OpenStreetMap, so not really the foursquare-like thing you’re describing, but a simple tool with a constrained set of fields.
Comment from CloCkWeRX on 21 September 2015 at 12:04
Kort I hadn’t seen; it would be tempting to fork that an expand the story as to why you do the missions. It’s map-first like wheelmap.org is; but does reasonably well based on your current location to ask questions. I agree - it’d be good to add more interesting questions; I don’t really feel thrilled to be classifying track types. I might have a look at what’s possible there.
Re why you do the missions; you could imagine something like “Spooks” from Charles Stross’ Halting State working as an augmented reality game - a bit of work doing a backstory that you are an industrial spy/secret shopper “gathering intel” on businesses or similar; and missions to document 3 business of the same type with X attributes. Obviously don’t want to get people arrested for sneaking around; but with the right balance… Google’s now spun off game I never quite bought into, though I know many who have (and there’s a high overlap with geocaching in my circle of friends who played that).
That said, I think it’d be trickier than the opengeoquestions approach combined with knowing how to target people based on checkin/location history.