My Talk at State of the Map 2024

(How the iD Editor still can to do better in the long term)

This September, I presented some ideas for the future of OSM’s iD editor at the State of the Map conference in Nairobi. Now, the video recording of the talk is online. To summarize the talk’s content: I identified two core challenges faced by the iD editor which need to be addressed in the upcoming years:

1. Data Complexity

Naturally, OSM’s data got more complex over time – as an example, a simple school might have typically been mapped as a single POI node in OSM a couple of years ago, while nowadays the state of the art is to model it using multiple map features that are nested within each other. While this allows to represent the reality in a high level of detail, the added complexity needs to be accommodated for by the tooling, especially in an editor tailored for beginner mappers like iD. For a deep dive into this topic, see also Sarah Hoffmann’s talk at the same conference.

2. Map Maintenance

Another important point for the development of iD is that at least in some regions of the world, the mapping is moving away from mapping objects for the very first time on a blank map canvas. Instead, it becomes more any more important to efficiently keep the map up to date and perform map maintenance tasks. This insight is by the way definitely not new, as it was already discussed at State of the Map US 2013 by Alan McConchie. One of the proposed ways to address this topic could be to more prominently support the last check date tag in the editor.

This is all still at an early stage, and a lot is still to be figured out. So, any form of feedback is very welcome. Please get involved.

Object lifecycle mapping

One of the above mentioned ideas to make iD fit for the mapping tasks of the future is to make it more intuitive to change the lifecycle status of an object: For example when marking a feature that was under construction as completed, or when tagging a POI as temporarily or permanently closed. Mattia, who has already completed a Google Summer of Code project around the iD editor, has recently started to work on this as part of a university training course for his master studies in computer science.

In a preliminary analysis, we have already identified that the current state of which tagging schemas are used to map the lifecycle statuses of different kinds of map features is not very consistent in all cases. This means that we will definitely spend some time to figure out a good way to make the implementation as compliant as possible with how these statuses are currently mapped: As a first step, there will be a discussion thread in the community forum to discuss the involved details. Stay tuned to hear more about this from Mattia and me in the near future!

PS: If you are also interested to tackle a particular feature of the iD editor, for example in form of a university thesis, don’t hesitate to contact us!

Upcoming

• An update of iD in form of version 2.31 is coming soon. The most notable improvements of this release include a bugfix for the flickering while switching background imagery layers, as well a reworked unit test setup which hugely improves the developer experience: Instead of waiting around for minutes to see if your changes comply with iD’s test suite, you now typically get the results within seconds. Thanks Kyle for this very valuable contribution!
• The next online community chats are happening at the following dates, feel free to join if you like!
  • December 4, 3pm UTC
  • January 8, 3pm UTC