OpenStreetMap
Hello everyone,
My Google Summer of Code project period is almost over, but I plan on continuing to add features to iD as well as stay integrated with the OSM community long after this summer. After the release of notes, I have turned my attention to Q/A. There are a lot of impressive Q/A tools out there, including keepright.at. Keep right automatically detects issues, such as intersections without junctions between a waterway and a highway. Like notes, reporting QA errors can give users, especially new ones, an opportunity to make guided updates and corrections.
Below is a prototype of iD with a keepRight layer on indicating an array of errors to be corrected. In the future, we plan to add layer settings for filtering out error types (currently shown in different colors) and more. You’ll be able to demo this feature in iD soon.
Please let me know what you think and how helpful you think QA tools, especially automated error detection tools, will be for OSM users and editors. For further details, see the PR in iD.
Cheers! -Thomas H
Discussion
Comment from PlaneMad on 13 August 2018 at 07:53
This is brilliant, so good to see all that various amazing map tools are slowly coming together in a singe interface
Comment from R0bst3r on 14 August 2018 at 06:32
I agree with PlaneMad. Looks very good! Although some filters and problem solving functionality would be great.
Is it still relying on the hardware of keepright.at? Will it be integrated in OSM hardware? Or is keepright.at funded by OSM organizations?
Comment from Thomas_Hervey on 24 August 2018 at 19:09
Thanks for your feedback! We are considering a lot of ways to filter including by error type (as you can do on keepright.at), age of the error and when an entity with an error was last updated (also currently visible keepright.at). Currently, this feature relies on the error dump that is generated by a weekly QA run by keepright.at. So, as of now, iD will query all of the available error types from keepright.at based on their error types.
If you have any suggestions about what you’d like to see with QA tools or what users would benefit from (without over complicating them), let me know!
Thanks, -Thomas
Comment from TheEditor101 on 25 August 2018 at 13:52
Very pleased to see the beginnings of Q/A support in iD!
I make heavy use of KeepRight, Osmose and OSM Inspector and think making such tools more accessible is very valuable to new users.
The main weakness I foresee in showing Q/A tool messages in iD is that most currently aren’t very enlightening in regards to how to correct the issue. For example, in the image above a totally new user might be led to believe a junction node is necessary, but it could be that one highway is a bridge/tunnel that’s improperly mapped. Hopefully most users would realise this and then investigate how to tag the feature appropriately, but in future I’d love to see more verbose descriptions that cover possible causes and how to correct them (even linking the appropriate wiki pages).
The reason I mention this is that I’ve ran into it myself, KeepRight’s almost junction warning made me think I had to move the end of one way further from another and it wasn’t until I started using Osmose later that I found out about the
noexittag.Comment from Thomas_Hervey on 27 August 2018 at 21:52
Thanks for your comments @TheEditor101. Bryan Housel and I were discussing how other QA tools should be added, and that they should be configurable (such as filtering by error type). I agree that these errors are somewhat cryptic. I do worry that sending users to a wiki or even off the osm website (like to keepright.at) could slow down editing and may cause users to give up. Since KeepRight doesn’t have suggestions, we may have to come up with those manually in iD, or based on what the OSM community thinks would be good suggestions. Perhaps I could reach out to the creator of keepright.at and see what suggestions they have. It is indeed nice that osmose does give suggestions and perhaps it should be added to iD before KeepRight. I’ll think on this some more today.