State of the Map 2017 attendees
State of the Map 2017 was a lively event. This was my first attendance at a State of the map conference. There was good participation from experienced community members from different parts of the world along with members from OSMF, DWG and from companies such as Mapillary, Telenav, Facebook, Apple, GeoRepublic, Grab and more.
It is wonderful to be part of this vibrant community. I have Mapbox to thank, for introducing me to OpenStreetMap and allowing me to work with passionate people for mapping, documentation and validation. I would like to use this diary post to answer some of the recurring questions on OSMCha and some notes from State of the Map 2017.
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Arun’s talk made it clear that new mapper validation catches 60% of all cases of data issues on OSM. This was already a reason in OSMCha for participants to try out during the validation workshop.
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I felt that there was a common agreement on peer reviewing amongst local mappers from the SoTM attendees. This promotes constructive feedback, builds a stronger community and results in better data quality.
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It was great to meet Frederick Ramm from DWG. The workflow the validation team at Mapbox follows has been similar to how DWG approaches in fixing issues, escalations and in sharing feedback to users to become core mappers.
OSMCha
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OSMCha is getting adopted amongst the community rapidly. Last week, 311 changesets were reviewed by various members of the community. The recent OSM feature to request a changeset review can help new contributors to map with more confidence and build a error free map. Do read Pascal Niess’ nice blog post about this and for other ways to review changesets.
- If you are a developer or a team who intends to use OSMCha but if you prefer your own instance, feel free to deploy your own. Here are the resources
- OSMCha frontend - https://github.com/mapbox/osmcha-frontend
- OSMCha backend and API - https://github.com/willemarcel/osmcha-django
- API docs - http://osmcha.mapbox.com/api-docs/
- Documentation on using OSMCha is at https://osmcha.mapbox.com/about. It would be great to have this translated into local languages by community members. This will help OSMCha serve and reach out to local communities better.
OSM-Compare
- OSM-Compare is the open library of GeoJSON comparison rules that flags problematic edits in OSMCha https://github.com/mapbox/osm-compare
- We can use OSM-Compare not only for identifying odd changes on OSM, but also as a social tool or watchlist of certain feature edits:
- I saw passionate rail mappers at SoTM, I think it would help to flag changesets with rail edits so OSM users can identify and interact with each other, in local communities.
- Blake Girardot recently opened an issue to flag any changes to
man_made=survey_point
features. This is now a compare function in OSM-Compare ready to flag the first such change in OSMCha. - If you have any other niche use case of OSM-Compare that you would like to use it for, awesome!! Please feel free make an issue and I can help you write a compare function in OSM-Compare that you can use as a reason in OSMCha.
Join us in validation
If you are new to OSMCha and not sure where to start, going through review_requested
changesets in your local area is great way to begin. This is a new feature that landed in iD editor on OpenStreetMap. These are the steps I would follow:
- Set the OSMCha filter for changesets with the reason
Review requested
. This link will set it for you. - Open the filters and modify the
bbox
to your local map area that you want to review. - Hit
Apply
to view the list of changesets that was requested for review - Go through the changesets and submit feedback to the mapper by commenting on the changeset on OpenStreetMap based on your assessment.
Discussion