OpenStreetMap
Road Watcher - a simple Python bot to monitor road class changes
Posted by RicoElectrico on 26 April 2024 in English.There are some object categories in OSM whose exact classification is often a matter of contention and edit wars. Main highways are one of the most prominent examples. There was a small edit war in Poland which resulted in no less than 4 blocks, but I did not let that crisis go to waste:
Behold road-watcher, a quick Python project that regurarly queries Overpass API for highway=secondary and above within a specified boundary and then detects any classification changes, sending them to a Discord channel (though it’s trivial to substitute it with another means of notification).
Discussion
Comment from mmd on 5 May 2024 at 08:27
You could probably achieve something similar by using https://gist.github.com/mmd-osm/bca4da8cd9afe8a071c45fef38e9afa6 -
The query only returns ways which have changed since a cut off timestamp (newer:…), and then returns the same ways again at the cut of timestamp itself.
As a result, you don’t need to store the previous query result anymore but only the last processing timestamp.
Also, the query result should hopefully be much smaller, like a few hundred ways instead of more than 200k.
There’s one caveat: the way the retro statement is used here might change in the future (see https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Overpass_API/Overpass_QL#The_block_statement_retro )