Hello everyone!

I will be sharing my GSoC’21 journey with OpenStreetMap through this diary. Feel free to ask me questions if you have any, I would be delighted to answer them!

Who am I?

I am Antonin Jolivat, a French student in an Engineering School which specializes in Computer Science.

Passionate about Software Engineering, I spend many time to discover new domains and create personal projects related to them. The rest of my time, I like to read about what others people do, entertain myself with various things and work out to stay in shape.

I came accross OpenStreetMap while working on a project involving maps and it stayed in my mind. I recently got involved a lot more as I have chosen OSM as my organization for the GSoC’21, and I am very happy to have made this choice! :)

My GSoC Project: QA Reports Extraction Tool for Nominatim

This project is mainly concerning Nominatim but it will help to increase overall OSM data quality.

Nominatim is the OSM’s main geocoding software used to process geocoding requests on OpenStreetMap data. The software uses its own database schema which differs from the one used by the main OSM database. As a result, Nominatim processes OSM data in a way that allows to discover a lot of inconsistencies. The idea of the project is to build a Quality Assurance Tool which will analyze the Nominatim database and extract errors from the OSM data.

Those errors would be made available to everyone through a map, so that OSM mappers will be able to correct them easily.

At the beggining, we plan to use Osmoscope to display the data errors through a map. This map may be available under https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/osmoscope (/!\ subject to change)

In the future we could even imagine to share the data errors through other tools, like in the form of challenges suitable for https://maproulette.org/.

The main goals of the project are:

• Supporting quality assurance rules like the ones already presented there.

• The tool should be modulable so that it is easy to add a new rule.

• It should run fast because it will be executed once per day stopping regular updates on the Nominatim database.

• We should have an Osmoscope instance accessible to everyone. This instance should show the data errors previously extracted by the QA tool.

I think that this project will be very beneficial for the whole OSM community and not only to Nominatim as it will help to increase OSM data quality.

I will add new entries to this diary as I go along with the project. I hope it’s an interesting topic for you, Thank you for reading!