OpenStreetMap
History tab: current vs new - local survey edits comparison
Posted by ppawel on 18 January 2013 in English.I’ve just found a great edit by user Math1985 near my home location. This user added a lot of details based on a local survey - the best way to map!
Hopefully looking at such edits in the new History tab will be a small additional reward for your survey efforts. Check this out:
Now compare this with the current view which is filled with world wide edits like massive Wikipedia link fixes, tag spelling fixes etc.
See this example here.
شننه
په 18 January 2013 په 13:37 باندې د Tom Chance تبصره
This is a huge improvement, it would be great to roll this out to the OSM homepage.
One of the other frustrating shortcomings of the current history features on the web site, which your panel goes some way to fixing, is that you can’t visualise features that have been deleted. A next step would be to show the feature in the map view on pages like osm.org/browse/way/131004269
په 18 January 2013 په 14:31 باندې د ppawel تبصره
@Tom: Exactly. One of the major features of OWL (the service that powers this new History tab) is that it tracks changes in geometry so it’s possible to even show some nice animation on node/way/relation history page to show how given object has changed during its life.
په 18 January 2013 په 16:30 باندې د Tom Chance تبصره
That sounds good.
Often with these monitoring tools, I see that somebody has made some changes but when I look at the changeset I can’t really work out what they have done. Have they shifted a road 10m to the east, or just touched some nodes while making other changes in the area? Is this changeset something I should check or ignore? It’s almost impossible to tell at the moment.
په 18 January 2013 په 16:34 باندې د ppawel تبصره
Yeah, that’s the challenge I’m trying to tackle with OWL and the new History tab. The technical problem is that it’s not easy to track changes - all database schemas and, in general, data sources that we have are geared towards rendering and/or having only current data. That’s not enough when you want to analyze changes - which by definition requires you to have the “before” state and the “after” state to calculate what’s changed.
If you have any suggestions on how to improve the usefulness of this tool then please don’t hesitate to create new issues on Github:
https://github.com/ppawel/openstreetmap-website/issues
په 18 January 2013 په 17:07 باندې د Rovastar تبصره
Nice one Pawel. Glad to see my request I email you is implemented. Looking forward to this on the OSM page.
There are more and more of these global/large scale edits recently (and they are needed to correct some of what is in the database).
په 19 January 2013 په 07:35 باندې د porjo تبصره
Looks great, keep up the good work!
په 19 January 2013 په 18:39 باندې د mcld تبصره
Oh thank GOODNESS you’re doing this :) the history tab is so unhelpful because filled with worldwide edits that usually don’t even have any content in the current bounding box. Looking forward to this.
په 11 March 2013 په 20:32 باندې د porjo تبصره
Hi ppawel,
Just wondering how this is going - is it any closer to going live?
په 12 March 2013 په 05:14 باندې د ppawel تبصره
@porjo: It is moving forward but there is still a long road to production. A lot of polishing is needed and also probably a new server for OWL is needed to handle production traffic.