OpenStreetMap
Hi,
My name is Branko from Microsoft. Microsoft’s involvement with OSM spans several impactful contributions:
- Providing Bing imagery since 2010 for free use in OSM for whole world (and all the drama that comes with it)
- Creating Map builder – intuitive editor for Bing users that want to edit OSM map (and all the drama that comes with it)
- Maintaining iD in the interim period before Martin took over (sorry, no drama here, just plain good old maintainership)
- Released world coverage of AI-mined building footprints and road data as open data
This list is not intended to be PR for Microsoft, and I know this sounds like a corporate cliché, but this list is hopefully showing that Microsoft is really committed to success of OSM. Stuff that we did previously, stuff in that list above, is stuff that we think will benefit the community and improve OSM contributions. And we hope it did! A lot of us recently visited SotM EU 2023 and I hope you saw us all around. That event allowed us to see stuff from a different perspective and to try to think out of the box. So, we thought, what if we pause trying to figure out what is the best way to improve OSM contributions on our own and instead - ask YOU how Microsoft can help!? Yes, YOU, the community, directly here in the diary😊. I know this may sound unconventional, but hey – OSM is also not the most conventional project out there, so we thought this might just be the proper way to gather interesting ideas.
Some projects are easy and a single individual can tackle them easily. But some projects might require larger teams of developers, designers and resources. We think we are well positioned to take on ideas that sit nicely in these sweet spots. Ideas to think of should be 6-12 months in scope (but don’t be shy to suggest other ideas, we can brainstorm on how to increase scope if project is small, or how to transition it in maintenance mode if it is too big/needs lot of service work). Ideally, ideas should help improve quality and/or quantity of data on OSM map in some direct way (and in a broad coverage). But, honestly, there are no hard constraints, this is brainstorming only, every idea is fair game. Of course, no need to say that we don’t promise that these ideas will come to life (maybe none of them will), but what we can promise is that we will look at each of them and discuss them. And even if there is nothing out of it, comments in this diary will stay, someone next might come after us, look at this diary and some new ideas might emerge from reading them.
Maybe you think we should create a new vandalism detection platform, maybe we should implement that Segment Anything model in JOSM (half-way there, but seems not that easy) and host it in Azure for the whole world, maybe we should tackle first item on v0.7 wishlist – messaging API, or maybe we should just implement something cool inside Map builder… please tell us what you think in comments below and let’s brainstorm together. Again, no promises, but we would like to hear from you.
Discussion
Comment from russdeffner on 12 December 2023 at 05:32
Hello Branko!
When I first started volunteering for HOT in 2012, and for many years, we considered Bing the ‘defacto’ imagery to align mapping with. I think somewhere around 2017 there was a major update to the global imagery that introduced a significant offset to many areas. When we reached out the answer was basically ‘the imagery is within the expected specifications’ and ever since, we haven’t had a ‘global standard’ for imagery alignment. I do believe offset has improved bit by bit over the last handful of years but my wish would be that we could again recommend that Bing be used as the default imagery to align too, even if it’s not the highest resolution or most recent.
Thank you for the opportunity to chime in and no worries if priorities go another direction.
Comment from Branko Kokanovic on 12 December 2023 at 11:40
Thanks @russdeffner for encouraging comment! We are aware that Bing is not recommended in some countries (Latvia, for example), but I will ping you in messages to get more specific territories where you notice this issue (not to pollute this main thread). Since this was mostly call for ideas for development/software and my team, I will mention this issue to appropriate team (once I got more specific details from you:))
Comment from arnalielsewhere on 12 December 2023 at 11:46
Hi Branko, you can also post in the community forum for wider reach :) https://community.openstreetmap.org/
Comment from russdeffner on 12 December 2023 at 12:06
You’re welcome Branko, I’ll try to find some ‘real time’ examples but from the original discussion on the HOT mailing list it seemed to be mostly noticed in Central and Southern Africa. Jubal Harpster was part of that discussion then, not sure if he is still with Bing, but might have some better insight. I’ve also asked on the HOT Slack if anyone has good, recent, examples of Bing being less useful in areas they’re mapping. So hopefully others can chime in and help define the scope of the issue.
Comment from MxxCon on 12 December 2023 at 18:19
Regarding Bing satellite imagery, more often imagery updates, have more consistent vintage metadata to more easily tell if it’s the latest available and if it should be relied on.
I don’t know if that’s wanted, but allocate some development resources for iD since its progress is rather slow.
And similarly for OsmCha. Most obvious 2 are: stability/performance and ability to show diffs for changesets with large bboxes.
Comment from rtnf on 12 December 2023 at 18:21
More support for public transportation data on OSM. Make it easier for any casual user to use, access and add new public transportation data. (I’m trying to build one here : https://github.com/altilunium/bisangkot )
Comment from Branko Kokanovic on 12 December 2023 at 20:27
@arnalielsewhere Sure, thanks, I will do it later!
@MxxCon Regarding imagery, unfortunately, I have same answer as for russdeffner - I will pass it to more appropriate team:) Regarding iD, we have good relations with Martin and we are confident he is good steward for iD, but if there is anything specific (or of bigger chunk in iD) that you think we can tackle to help Martin - shoot. We are certainly going to think about some new features in iD, that is good suggestion! For OsmCha, I cannot really comment - we are not experts on that codebase today, backend is not open source, IIUC (I guess - rightfully) and I am not a fan of idea to host another instance or to fork it.
@rtnf Funnily enough, I also have my own GTFS tool. GTFS is not easy problem, I know that much:). I suggest you add yourself in wiki here. And good luck! You mention in same sentence “use” and “add” PT data. I would split this to two ideas - one is to consume PT data and other is to add/edit PT data. First one is not that interesting (and I would leave that to some other teams in Microsoft) to my team, but for our team - GTFS/public transport editor might be interesting. I can imagine pitching it as “PT editor that is as easy as StreetComplete and powerful as PTNA”. Thanks for chiming in, we will consider it! (I mean - not just us, all these ideas is free for everyone to pick!)
Comment from MxxCon on 12 December 2023 at 20:49
For iD some QoL features like automatically format phone numbers to follow the guidelines in https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:phone
Improve opening_hours editor beyond just a plain text box.
Improve color picker to sample more than just 1 pixel for specify average or most common roof or other features color.
Or even just look through the PRs and issues. I’m sure many of them are valid and have merit to exist.
Comment from tastrax on 13 December 2023 at 09:53
Many thanks for asking the community!
For me, it would be great if ID in edit mode supported easier identification of actual or missing addresses somehow. I know there have been multiple attempts in the past but none have eventuated, I feel this would encourage editors to fill in gaps or add more addresses. Even if only at level 19/20 it would still be very useful.
https://github.com/openstreetmap/iD/pull/3840 https://github.com/openstreetmap/iD/issues/1524
Other than that I am sure there are lots of other issues that users have contributed over time. I suspect priorities will be the hardest to identify.
Comment from vorpalblade on 13 December 2023 at 13:55
Aerial?) and highest resolution/whatever we get fromAerialOSMright now. I don’t think it would be a lot of coding work to support both on the editor side, but we apparently want to useAerialOSMoverAerialin OSM editors now.Comment from rab on 13 December 2023 at 14:19
Please turn AI road detection into a QA tool to check for non-existent roads and to detect geometry changes and problems to existing roads.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/edit?editor=id&way=706535955#map=17/-19.17576/33.99830
https://www.openstreetmap.org/edit?editor=id#map=17/2.35091/37.99590
Comment from Branko Kokanovic on 13 December 2023 at 18:28
@MxxCon All valid suggestions (and valid main idea - to work on iD). opening_hours is pet peeve of mine:/ thanks again.
@tastrax I would put this, same as with @MxxCon user, to “help iD” bucket. Regarding addresses, I am not sure what do you mean by “identify missing address”. Like - look at some external source (some open address data) and identify if it is missing, or just detect if there house near some road? Anyway, yes, personally, to me this looks like address presentation can be improved (imagine ability to toggle check box and get color-coded addresses in iD, like in “Coulored Streets” map style in JOSM!). I am just brainstorming here now:)
@vorpalblade Thanks for your input! I will take this permission question offline and see if we can get this permission. I am not lawyer, so I will refrain from commenting further my thoughts on this:) For SAM, there are two ways to “solve” it, IMHO - one is to do everything in JOSM client. Other is to rely on “harder” (generation of embeddings) part to some online service/API and JOSM can do only decoding part + geometry adjusting. But, let’s clear this permission problem, if possible. Regarding 3 - will pass it further.
@rab Thanks, interesting suggestion. I will put this under “new tooling, QA specifically” bucket (tools that can help improve OSM data quality, not quantity directly or ease of contributions)!
Comment from RicoElectrico on 13 December 2023 at 19:58
As per improving the website: a notification center along with some push notification facility (as the community forum does) would be welcome. Emails may get stuck in the “notifications” folder that many Gmail users probably rarely read. Really, even for active mappers the response rate is suspiciously low.
Comment from Koreller on 13 December 2023 at 21:09
I have to say that I keep a critical distance from the GAFAMs, but Microsoft’s involvement in making its imagery available is a precious source for the OSM community. Thank you for allowing us to use it! And this initiative you’re taking improves your image in my eyes. Thank you for the direct contact with the community that you enable!
I think that the most relevant efforts should be put into JOSM and iD, the most massive editors of the OSM database. And since it’s Christmas, here’s my list :D : 1/ Creation of a JOSM plugin to visualize the 3D aspect of buildings live, which would enable 3D tags to be added and the result of this contribution to be checked more easily before being sent to the OSM database. 2/ Creation of a tutorial for getting to grips with JOSM (integrated into the JOSM interface, in much the same way as iD currently offers). 3/ Creation of an iD tutorial for adding AI buildings (a thematic tutorial directly in iD to understand how to enrich OSM but with tools that use AI, for example: how to import buildings cleanly from Global ML Building Footprints, how to do it, what specific quality control is needed/is it possible to do etc.). 4/ Improved JOSM interface (UI/UX designer to make JOSM easier to use/faster to learn). 5/ Addition of Bing imagery shooting date. This may not seem like a very important idea, but it’s important for data freshness! To avoid mapping buildings that no longer exist, for example. 6/ Implementing JOSM modularity (well, it’s not very concrete on the OSM base, but why not, it’s Christmas isn’t it :D?) cf. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:JOSM-SotmWorld2019-VincentPrivat.pdf
Comment from Fizzie41 on 13 December 2023 at 22:07
In regard to missing addresses, as mentioned by Tastrax ^.
Here in Australia, & I’m sure in other places, we have access to some Government data, but other departments refuse to allow us permission to use their data, often as they’re apparently scared / confused by the requirement to agree to allowing use under ODbL.
I would think that Microsoft would have a LOT bigger pull than OSM! :-), so it would be great if you could access even just street number data worldwide, & feed that into OSM, possibly by RapiD?
That would help solve one of the major problems with use of OSM for navigating - not being able to find the address you want to go to.
Comment from vorpalblade on 13 December 2023 at 22:29
This is mostly a reply to Koreller:
kendzi3d. If you have issues with that one, trykendzi3d-dev. Neither is perfect, but it should get you going. Neither is something I maintain, although I’ve done a bit of work on the latter.Getting StartedMOTD section. People just don’t read it.Show tile info->Metadata Capture Date. It will be a range. For example, for tile 19/104027/200249, it is 6/24/2020-7/8/2020.ant->mavenandsvn->gitare things we would want to have “done” before we start in on breaking parts of JOSM out into independently usable libraries.Comment from 02JanDal on 14 December 2023 at 08:24
I presume you’re rather looking for things to spend manhours on than just money, but I’ll add it anyway: In Sweden the national Land Survey collects high quality aerial imagery (0,15-0,37 cm/pixel), but while we’ve gotten a positive but somewhat unclear answer on general usage, we are not allowed to add it as a preconfigured layer in iD/JOSM without paying. Would sponsoring this be a possibility? It would significantly improve the imagery available when mapping in Sweden, thus significantly improving both the velocity and quality of armchair mapping (which, given our ratio of mappers to country area, is how a lot of mapping here is done).
(I actually just a few days ago sent an email to openmaps(at)microsoft.com asking basically the same question)
Another thing, I’m working on a few OSM-related projects (mostly comparing/conflating OSM and various Swedish open datasets) which currently run on my own server and some in Azure (one of these I just yesterday had to put on hold, as it was looking to get a bit to expensive otherwise…). So maybe making processing/storage in Azure available for OSM-related projects?
Comment from Branko Kokanovic on 15 December 2023 at 17:46
@RicoElectrico I got it. You probably refer for changeset comments, as unread message count is already visible on website. Of course, if people visit website at all afterwards. If messaging API is implemented, every client could show and interact with unread messages (but again - not with changeset comments). I would file this under “work on osm.org improvements” and under “messaging API”
@Koreller I understand GAFAM sentiment, and thank you for understanding. I see you and @vorpalblade had nice discussion, I learned new things from it:) Your point (if I can try to summarize it) is to invest more into existing editors. Regarding specifics: 1. I guess @vorpalblade answered you, I also don’t believe this is for JOSM core. 2. Yeah, this is real problem. @vorpalblade says people don’t read it, but to be honest - I never read it either (and I use JOSM almost every day). Tutorial is better as it has “show, don’t tell” approach (like in tutorials in games) and I think iD’s approach here is better (their walkthrough). And as someone who lead some mapathons, it is far better to show people how to do stuff. In Map builder, we are also trying to figure out best approach - competing for attention is not easy problem. 3. Not sure if tutorial in iD suffice, what would be point of it? I would say (since we are talking about Christmas wishlists:D), maybe new layer is better, or even server-side hosted component that can materialize building/road that can later be tuned manually (rapiD approach). 4. I don’t know what to say about it, if @vorpalblade says it is hard - I can only believe:) 5. I got bitten by this couple of times, really annoying. Maybe it does makes sense to put capture date somewhere more visible (currently “always show current copyright year in bottom right corner” doesn’t make any sense) 6. I am not sure what you refer to. I think JOSM is far, far more modular than iD. What I would like to see is more modularity and “plugins” for iD - most popular JOSM plugins could be converted to be optional iD plugins, like building_tools etc:) We can both be dreaming, why not:) Thanks for good topics, willingness to discuss with GAFAM and happy Christmas!:)
@Fizzie41 As I mentioned, unfortunately, I am part of dev team. What we were brainstorming is to maybe create some platform and make it easy both for a) governments to provide data under usable licence, b) make it easy for mappers to assess quality, to announce and execute those imports (while keeping humans in loop). I will put this under “government data” bucket.
@02JanDal Sorry, but this is orthogonal to what we were asking here. I cannot give you more info on any of these. I will ask around this e-mail alias you mentioned (who is looking at it and nudge them, just to be sure your request is seen), but I don’t think that today we are providing either sponsorship nor Azure resources. But I am glad you mentioned it, it is good to know that community also need resources like this - I will compile list for us and this will be certainly included.
Comment from ASchon on 15 December 2023 at 18:03
I dont know if microsoft has any influence with the rapid editor or if its solely a meta project, but work on detecting already-covered addresses would be great. something like “if a poi or building with this address already exists within 50m then dont offer it for users to confirm” for the US national address database and others.
Comment from pedrito1414 on 18 December 2023 at 12:10
If Microsoft is still interested in supporting iD editor development, that building mapping tool idea is still hanging and it would really help mappers involved in remote mapping buildings and validators doing the QA afterwards… I found this issue on the tasking manager github: https://github.com/hotosm/tasking-manager/issues/5974%E2%80%A6 but maybe others might know of more up-to-date documentation?
Comment from Branko Kokanovic on 22 December 2023 at 14:02
@ASchon I would put this under “help with existing editors”, as it seems you are referring to new feature for rapid. More specifically, what you ask seems to be more on rapid backend which is proprietary and so, this specific request should go to them directly.
@pedrito1414 Not sure what “building mapping tool” idea? Can you clarify? I mean, whatever you were referring to, I guess this is also under “help existing editors with new features, specifically features designed to help with large/easier contributions”:)
Comment from 快乐的老鼠宝宝 on 24 December 2023 at 12:18
What I want to say has basically been mentioned above, but I still feel it is necessary to talk some of my views. Bing’s image timeliness has improved very well in Mainland of China recently - I mean, from 5-6 years ago, to 2-3 years ago. But for areas that are rapidly urbanizing, this is obviously not enough for mapping (on the contrary, there are even mappers that delete local mapper roads and buildings based on too old satellite images) I hope that bing can provide more help in areas where official open data is almost impossible to obtain (especially China and North Korea). Of course, I know that it will cost a astronomical amounts to update all the image data in such a large country to latest. Therefore, maybe we can introduce a new mechanism where active mappers or communities can request to updated images in a certain area of several square kilometers, or Microsoft can judge where in these countries new images are more needed based on the level of activity on OSM?
The second request is, will Microsoft consider recommending to the josm community to move to git workflow as soon as possible? (Unfortunately I am not a developer using Java)
Finally, for the “Map Builder”:, I am very pessimistic about the role of MS in it. For details, see
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Pieter%20Vander%20Vennet/diary/400909
Comment from AngocA on 24 December 2023 at 16:24
Hi Branko
Most mappers use the Result Maps tool from Pascal Neis (HDYC, notes, etc.); however, in the last few days, it has been down, producing issues for the mappers (from my side to identify the new notes in my country).
It would be interesting to have a similar tool for OSM profiles and provide near real-time stats about different elements of OSM. A tool developed as OpenSource and hosted in a shared platform in a way that many admins and developers could help.
As part of the OSM Latam community, we have started a project focused on notes to provide analytics: https://github.com/OSMLatam/OSM-Notes-profile
Comment from MxxCon on 24 December 2023 at 16:29
@AngocA, please don’t speak for “most mappers”. YOU might be using that site, but you have no accurate information to claim that “most mappers” use it.
Comment from rouelibre1 on 25 December 2023 at 12:01
@MxxCon have you tried https://projets.pavie.info/yohours/ to help with opening hours data ?
Comment from MxxCon on 26 December 2023 at 01:32
Yes, I’m aware of that site. There’s also https://www.webmapping.cyou/WebToOSMOH/ But the point of my request is to simplify things so that there’s no need to switch to a different tab to do that. And it’d be especially useful for new users who might not know about these sites.
Comment from rouelibre1 on 26 December 2023 at 10:14
Here’s the christmas wishlist (a little late technically)
A tool https://openmobilityindicators.org/ on a worldwide scale (and with better detection of true pedestrian dead-end, as this tool doesn’t take into account the connectivity of pedestrian ways with areas, so it has a lot of false positives) (https://gitlab.com/open-mobility-indicators)
An automated tool for the “arrogance of space” concept https://colvilleandersen.medium.com/the-arrogance-of-space-93a7419b0278 It’s not pure OSM but would likely require various data inputs (such as aerial imagery, and OSM data)
Adapt the codebase of https://github.com/a-b-street/abstreet for internationalization
Iterate on this tool to detect and map pedestrian crossings https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/NorthCrab/diary/402069 (maybe integrate and distribute it in a more user friendly and collaborative way so each local community can be empowered and follow the completion of pedestrian crossings integration in OSM)
iOS version of StreetComplete (cf https://github.com/streetcomplete/StreetComplete/issues/5421)
Integration of Panoramax (https://panoramax.fr) in iD, JOSM, StreetComplete (and other major tools)
Comment from tordans on 28 December 2023 at 05:02
Thanks for reaching out Branko! Here are a few thinks I have been thinking about for a while. I can tell you more about each of those ideas…
(a) Improve low interaction, positive communication on osm.org by adding (selected) reactions to changeset comments. — Why: The social aspect of OSM is at least as big and important as the geodata part. And I think we lack behind in looking into how to improve it on osm.org. One low hanging fruit is to add an ability to the website to show (positive) feedback on something without writing text. Github and all other social platforms – including messengers – use a limited list of emojii to allow reaction on events and comments. With such a Feature, I can show my “<3” on a changeset, without adding text. Or promote and validate a comment mit a “+1”. We also need to find the right emoji to express some disagreement without making the dialogue worse. — There is no ticket on this, yet. I consider this very impactful but also too big to tackle for the osm.org-maintainers or someone in her free time. I was hoping the paid EWG projects might evolve to tackle things like this, but this is a very slow process.
(b) Improve communication by auto linking currently separate threads — This builds on the idea that we can use better tooling to improve the conversations we in our OSM eco system. The idea is, to add a pingback/trackback system to changesets and other comment formats. Example: I read a note, update the map and because I referenced the note in my changeset comment it gets automatically created link back to that changeset. The same goes for changesetes that reference themselves. — There are already established and tested ways to to thin in Github but also the WorPress eco system, which can be used as a frame of reference. — There is no ticket on this, yet. I consider this very impactful but also too big to tackle for the osm.org-maintainers or someone in her free time.
(c) Improve communication by adding at-messaging on osm.org. — Again, given that Changeset comments and OSM Notes are a center point of communication on map related topics, the fact that we cannot “ping” each other in those messages make the communication worse. Of course, other questions have to be tackled like a notification system that can handle such pings. — There is no ticket on this, yet. I consider this very impactful but also too big to tackle for the osm.org-maintainers or someone in her free time.
(d) Improve Navigation on OSM.org with a UX Redesign for logged out and logged state. — Why: Right now, logged in and out states are not very separate. The logged in state is less ideal because space is taken up by actions that are focussed on logged out users. The navigation experience of logged in users could be a lot better. UseCases like “go to my last changeset” involve a lot of clicking around. At the same time, I see a great opportunity (but also dragons…) in fokussing the story of osm.org when looking at what we present to logged out users. (strategically this might be better left as a separate project) — There is no ticket on this, yet. It consider starting the a well scoped and worded ticket is already part of the UX work and should be done by an UX designer that has some time to think about this first.
(e) Enhance the changeset data with micro-bounding boxes. — Why: We have issues with “world spanning changesets” again an again. Those create issues for all tools, the osm.org website and OSMCha are the most prominent. But there are also tickets on nearly all editors I monitor discussing how to limit users to create such changesets. However, there is also a possible technical solution that Simon mentioned (https://en.osm.town/@simon/111311834237289626): What if we enhance the changeset processing to return not only the changeset bbox but also micro-bboxes for regional segements of data. A changeset that spans Paris, London and Berlin could have 3 micro-bboxes for the changes in those cities. A changeset that spans all Berlin but could have 2 micro-bboxes for changes in Mitte and Neukölln (districts). Tools like OSMCha could than use those micro-bbox data for their processing which would improve their usefullness. — There is no ticket on this, yet. It would be a great first step if someone with some knowledge about the issues and possibilities where to start this conversation on osm.org.
(f) Enhance OSMCha to “subscribe changes in this are” by email (and RSS) (with Object type filter) — Why: We need more visibility into changes after we edited the map. This is one of the main issues I have in getting people that are not OSMler at their core to contribute their expert knowledge to OSM like city planner, local tourism agencies and so on. The need to have the feeling of control over what happens with the data they contributed or the region they contributed to. OSMCha is the best solution we have right now and IMO it is not good enough to solve this use case. There is a lot that can be done here with some Funding and help.
(g) Improve the tooling that allows to compare external data to OSM data in order to understand but mainly prepare data to be added to OSM. I wrote about this in https://github.com/facebook/Rapid/issues/585#issuecomment-1249994877 “Help with data preparation”. Any tooling that makes it easier to take two datasets (lines or points or mixed) and separate them in “already in OSM”, “missing in OSM” will be great. Ideally those tools will help the person working with the data to understand the differences and look into the data (show map, inspect properties, see buffers …) to easily modify the settings.
(h) Port StreetComplete to iOS. — Thats it, that is the whole idea :-). However, the implications are quite bit. Tobias Zwick wrote about what would have to happen in the SC git repo. And one core question is, who will maintain this version. — On the other hand: It would open up so much potential for new, local mapping campaigns if the tool where cross platform…
(Consider this a +1 to rouelibre1)
(i) Improve tooling for local mapping initiatives. — One USP and strength of OSM is local knowledge. But once a topic gets too big for one to handle, we lack good tooling to coordinate and motivate a group of people. Especially if those groups are a mix of newbies and veterans. Unfortunately the tooling and workflows differ a lot based on what the projects groups goal is. However, a few things are commonly true: A grid based approach like the tasking manager is mostly not suited for adding data to existing line and point data; we should be looking at task based tools instead. — StreetComplete is a great tool for campaigns like “add curb height to all crossings in our neighborhood” and since SC recently added QR-codes a local group can easily share this project with newbies and veterans alike and have a clean editing workflow with great UX. However, that limits us to Android users and also to only those groups of tasks that are specified within the app. — A more open approach is MapRoulette, which allows adding all kind of tasks and work on them collaboratively. It is also editor agnostic, which is great to make our diverse group of newbies and (JOSM) veterans happy in terms of editors. However, MapRoulette severely lacks in the mobile editing area. https://github.com/maproulette/maproulette3/issues/1737 is a good overview on this. There is potential to do cross tooling work (and likely extend MR a bit) in order to get make MR the vocal point of a local initiative on a specific mapping topic. MR will be the shared task manager, activity hup, statistic source and leaderboard. And different editors can be used – based on preference but also OSM experience – to add the data in question. — One low hanging fruit for Microsoft could be to help your colleague Bryce to create a great MR integration for GoMap (starting point https://github.com/bryceco/GoMap/issues/240).
Comment from Branko Kokanovic on 28 December 2023 at 16:38
@快乐的老鼠宝宝 Thanks for thoughts! As I discussed before, we are development team, but we will pass this information for other imagery team, Idea about “voting for areas” is interesting on its own, though! Regarding moving to git workflow, I don’t think we are in any position, or of any entitlement to recommend to JOSM team what and how they will base their workflows, sorry. WRT your comments on Map builder, I am sorry to hear that and you have all right to keep distance from Map builder, and it is up to us to show (by our actions) that we want to be good force inside OSM.
@AngocA To be honest, I missed Result Maps badly myself these days, but as far as I understand, Pascal is working hard to bring Result Maps back, and while we can offer helping hand, I think Pascal got it covered (we can all just wish him luck and thank him at this point!). Your idea about moving some of these stats from Result Maps and enriching user profile is really good, I will put it under “improve osm.org” bucket. Regarding notes, I remember you from https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/tags-denoting-note-status-and-note-comments :) If I can merge your previous and this idea together, I am also thinking that osm.org can have improved interface for notes management (being able to have notification if someone replied to your note, being able to attach hashtags, reasons for closing, better searching for notes, and, as @tordans later mentioned - ability to add reactions or @mentions to note comments would be wow for user experience)
@rouelibre1 I am from eastern Europe and Christmas here is on 7. january, so you are not technically late, it is all all just matter of perspective:D Your list is really interesting and different than what is “norm”. Let me try to comment: 1., 2. This is more of urban planning and usage of OSM data. Our goal is to help OSM in upstream, that is - with getting more data and data with better quality, not its usage. But nonetheless, I like that you left these here, someone else might find this useful! Regarding 3, I wanted to adopt AB streets for my country, but there is lot of “secret sauce” in AB street (not “secret” as in hidden, but lot of stuff was highly tuned for Seattle). Maybe it changed in meantime, but 2-3 years ago, it would have been large endeavor. I still think this is more of “enhance/popularize usage of OSM data”, rather than adding new data in OSM. Number 4 looks interesting. Similar to Segment Anything. It can be JOSM plugin, iD add-on, or just preprocess something, refresh/conflate every day and expose data online in format that people can import easily or just put to Map Roulette. Regarding StreetComplete, I see that Tobias started working on it, it is progressing, but not sure if we have good iOS expertise to be actually useful to SC. I, personally, am glad for this effort, as my wife finally can have no excuse not to use SC:) Regarding Panoramax, good idea (I think they need desktop client too, which is also missing). We will think about it. Thanks for really interesting (and freshfully different) set of ideas!
@tordans Not sure where to start. These ideas could have some real impact on overall user experience inside osm.org! I will put (a), (b), (c) and (d) under “improve osm.org”. This will give users better social environment and better usability of platform they are using (and IMHO, they will feel more connected with rest of community). I like concept of better integration of notification (continuation of what @RicoElectrico said) - imagine if you get notification when you either receive changeset comment, be @mentioned, or someone put comment in your note (and it doesn’t have to be from osm.org, imagine if any client can do this or subset of this). You gave us lot to think with these ideas! Regarding (e), I think this is more of “improve infrastructure”. Also, this looks like KNN clustering where you don’t know N? Chinese whispers algorithm? (f) is really nice idea, I know there were (“were” in past tense) some implementation to watch some area, but there is nothing today (and sadly - nothing to fill that space), so I am wondering - do people really need that? Whenever I edit some wikipedia article, I always put “watch” to watch “my baby”. Somehow, due to OSM architecture, this was not usable option ever. (g) is also making lot of sense, especially if we think that there is lot of open data sitting around, just waiting for better tooling to be imported. Now, whether it is through RapiD, iD, some customer website is debatable, but I would stop myself here and just conclude this is really missing in OSM ecosystem of apps. (i) is kind-of fuzzy to me (to be honest) and I understand it as better integration of MR to other editors. Righteous idea, but not sure if it is for Microsoft to contribute to it.
Comment from 02JanDal on 28 December 2023 at 18:33
@tordans On (a), I proposed something like that here (including to offer to implement it), but the community reaction was between lukewarm and actively cold…
Regarding (d), there’s this which contains some interesting ideas.
Comment from pedrito1414 on 29 December 2023 at 15:59
Hi Branko, yes that’s right. A buiolding tool as exists in JOSM. Two clicks to draw rectangular buildings and three to draw circular, autotagged with building=yes.
Comment from maelito2000 on 31 December 2023 at 13:42
Hi, we’re developping a Web alternative to Google / Apple maps based exclusively using open source software and data.
To avoid getting lost in this ambition, it’s being developped first on a French region (Brittany), then France itself. We believe 67 millions of people is not too small for a first use case, and is a sweet spot for going fast ignoring international complexities, including translation (of UI, of place names).
Also, the app’s travel routes capabilites will focus exclusively on ecological travel. Car routing is heavy in dev time. Bike, train and bus travel, and a mix of all of these, do not require a live 3D navigation mode. A focus on car rental will also be prioritized.
It won’t replace CityMapper for metropolitan transit. It won’t replace Waze for car trips. Nor OrganicMaps for the very useful offline Android usage.
MP if interested :)
Comment from waldyrious on 4 January 2024 at 23:10
This is such a great initiative. Congrats on taking this unconventional route to collect suggestions (which really ought to be a lot more common!)
My suggestion is to invest in a couple relatively minor adjustments that would make iD usable from mobile devices. Now that we have StreetComplete and EveryDoor, what we’re missing is a similarly user-friendly interface that would allow actually adding and editing map elements more complex than single nodes.
I was surprised to discover that it’s already ~90% of the way there from another Diary entry:
An example of a small change that would do a lot to improve usability in small screens is collapsing the sidebar on first load (since it’s empty anyway as nothing should be selected), and generally auto-expanding/auto-collapsing it when an object is selected/deselected. Both of these changes should, naturally, only happen on small screens, keeping the existing experience unaltered.
Another useful change would be to show a magnifier when dragging nodes on the map (or perhaps have a “move” handle offset downwards from the node’s position), so that we can actually see where we’re placing them on the map. There are other issues listed under the touch-stylus tag, but I’d be happy to provide further feedback or concrete suggestions if this is a direction that would be considered interesting to pursue.
Since I registered my OSM account back in 2006, I was almost always an armchair mapper until recently when StreetComplete and EveryDoor came into the scene. I believe we all agree that direct survey is the best way to map, so having iD be usable on a mobile screen would, IMHO, make long strides in democratizing the ability to contribute to the map. (And yes, I previously tried Vespucci in multiple occasions, but always found it too cumbersome to use). I’m not even talking about distributing iD as a mobile app (though that would also be quite welcome!), but even just focusing some energy on making the browser-based version cross the final small UX issues to be usable as a bona-fide editor on mobile devices would be extremely helpful.
Comment from waldyrious on 4 January 2024 at 23:14
(Apologies for the gigantic image on my previous comment! I forgot to preview before publishing… 😬)
Comment from eerib on 5 January 2024 at 18:05
The most important thing for me as an editor in Canada would be to have more imagery presets available in iD and JOSM. Specifically, open data imagery available from municipal and regional governments & lidar data (in the form of a multi-directional hillshade) available from either the provincial government or Natural Resources Canada. This is really something that OSM itself lacks the capacity to accomplish and something a larger partner could easily accomplish.
Comment from rouelibre1 on 19 January 2024 at 12:25
I would love to be able to extract admin boundaries and “auto-magically” merge them to get a unique and perfect boundary of the area, but I didn’t have time to search for existing solutions, and I don’t expect that there is one or that it would be easy to develop (but it would certainly be a great tool / library for the OSM community)
I’ve built a small query in overpass turbo but stopped after the easy part : querying multiple areas => https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/1FMd
Everyone : if you have any thoughs, processes of existing tools that might help, would you be kind enough to share them with me ? (even if the process isn’t fully automated)
Comment from RedAuburn on 27 January 2024 at 20:53
Sorry for such a late comment, but a tool to easily tag & visualise road lanes would be incredibly useful, particularly as this info is so important for good car navigation :)