OpenStreetMap
It’s been a while since I last wrote about iD’s development and thought it would be a nice idea to make this a more regular thing in addition to the regular online community chats.
Recently, there have been some new features implemented that are worth showcasing, including several great ways that community members are stepping up to contribute to iD.
iD v2.30 release
In his Google Summer of Code project, Mattia Pezzotti has implemented support for street level imagery from Panoramax. Panoramax is a relatively new completely free and open-source alternative to other street level imagery providers such as Mapillary, KartaView or Bing Streetside. It even includes features like a federated system architecture and the possibility to self-host the server software if you need to. Check the project out on panoramax.fr to read more and how to contribute your own pictures.
You can read more about the Google Summer of Code project’s progress in Mattia’s personal blog. It’s been excellent to mentor Mattia through his project, and I think he is well set up to make more contributions in the future.
Other than that, the latest release also includes the ability to directly start iD with a note selected (e.g. #id=note/1234), and a bunch of bug fixes. Head over to the full changelog to read more about the details.
id-tagging-schema: new contributing guidelines
The tagging schema has also seen a lot of updates (see latest changelog if you’re interested), but the biggest change there is that we now have new documentation for how the tagging schema is maintained. The guidelines explain how the repository is managed from a content point of view; for example about what requirements a tag must fulfil to be included as a preset. The second new document is about how to contribute and support the project. We already have two volunteers who help in the co-maintainer role: Tobias and Kyle. There is still space for a few more people helping out. If you’re interested to helping moderating issues or being a co-maintainer of the repository, please contact me.
Coming Up
The next times to meet are the community chat on September 3, 15:00 UTC online, as well as at the State of the Map where I’m going to hold a talk about the bigger picture of the future of iD. There will also be the possibility to chat about these ideas in a bit more detail in a BoF session at the conference, as well as in one of the upcoming online community chats.
Another thing I’m planning of starting to work on in the coming weeks is the long anticipated building mapping mode in iD, with the goal to make this common mapping task more efficient and enjoyable.
Discussion
Comment from chris_debian on 22 August 2024 at 08:32
If an Android client existed for Panoramax, so I could easily collect imagery when driving/ cycling, I would permanently switch from Mapilio.
Fingers crossed.
Chris
Comment from SomeoneElse on 22 August 2024 at 11:03
Hi tyr_asd,
What are your thoughts about resolving the issues that make iD basically unsuitable to edit relations at all in OSM? Most of the edits that you can see at https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/SomeoneElse2/history are fixing issues that were intrduced by mappers using iD (comments such as “filled in gap in” etc.). I’ve raised a number of these at https://github.com/openstreetmap/iD/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+author%3ASomeoneElseOSM+relation (and other people have created “relation” issues too). The most egregious problem is simply this:
It’s not possible to distinguish from membership of a “relation of ways” from a higher level “relation of relations”, leading to errors that need to be fixed such as at e.g. https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/155217400 . iD also does not display other relevant details of relations (see the iD issue list) but the lack of display of the object ID literally makes it impossible for a user to check that they are adding something to the correct relation.
Best Regards,
Andy
Comment from Binnette on 24 August 2024 at 13:05
Thank for this diary, this is a very good way to learn about new ID features 😇👍
Comment from benoitdd on 28 August 2024 at 14:30
@chris_debian : there is an app, but it is so far pretty minimalistic (alpha version) : https://github.com/nobelization/panoramax-mobile-app
more info (in french) : https://forum.geocommuns.fr/t/appli-mobile-panoramax/1521/33
Comment from tyr_asd on 2 September 2024 at 13:13
@SomeoneElse: Yeah, (route) relations have been a bit neglected in iD in the past. Some bugs have already been addressed (e.g. https://github.com/openstreetmap/iD/issues/7653), but there is definitely still a bunch of work to do. Thanks for adding some suggestions for this already on github; let’s continue to discuss these ideas there. :)