Essen Developers Workshop/Results

Results of the OSM Developers Workshop April 14./15. in Essen, Germany

Participants:

• Jochen Topf
• Steve Coast
• Hakan Tandogan
• User:Frederik Ramm
• Dirk-Lüder Kreie (Deelkar)
• User:SlowRider
• Nick Black
• User:Banny
• Jörg Ostertag
• User:Josy
• Ulf Lamping
• Martin Spott
• Luka Frelih

The location was perfect. The weather was, too. We spent the evenings in the private park of the villa that had been built by the owner of a mining company, later served as a monastery and was now our hotel. We did a barbecue for lunch on Saturday, and unlimited drinks including beer and wine were included in the fare.

Getting to know each other and hearing all kinds of OSM stories was interesting and worthwile in itself. It turned out that we did a lot more talking and discussing than actually "ticking things off". (At one point we spent about three hours discussion wheter introducing namespaces is just a "third column" to keys/values, and how that column should be called...) Here's what we did:

• API 0.4 intro from Steve and some suggestions for improvements from group concerning backwards compatibility and some built-in consistency checks (like avoiding zero-length segments).
• Steve works on API while at the workshop. It is basically ready to go into production. Josy starts bringing REST documentation up to 0.4 standard.
• Discussion about how to improve JOSM. Christoph's presets are discussed. Some small changes are proposed, but otherwise they are universally acclaimed and should go into the standard JOSM distribution. (See Essen_Developers_Workshop/JOSM)
• Cleanup of subversion directory: The humongous utils directory and other parts were split up and things moved around. Editors and all renderers are now in applications/editors and applications/rendering, respectively. Subcategories under utils called import, export, and filter were added and populated. Many other changes. Some READMEs added.
• Discussion about interoperability with vmap0 data used in flightgear
• Jochen and Frederik present their ideas for a new data model (see also their paper). Discussion about this, but no resolution. Needs more work. Tags with namespaces (or at least "a third column") may appear soon; areas were supported in 0.3 but not supported by editors, thus no widespread use.
• Data replication discussed. See Essen_Developers_Workshop/Data_Replication
• Tweety explains how his osmfilter script can intelligently filter GPS tracks and automatically add OSM data from it without disturbing already existing data. See HowTo_OSMFilter.
• GPSdrive introduction from Tweety.
• Luka talks about his "mapping bike": http://twiki.ljudmila.org/bin/view/Luka/FridaV
• Discussion about how to work with multiple languages in the Wiki. No resolution; multiple Wikis would be nice but we'd have to find a way not to force people to create accounts for each. We'll investigate whether Mediawiki can be made to use existing OSM accounts. (See Single sign on)
• Discussion about how to achieve a Wiki cleanup. Jochen and Ulf to be made Wiki administrators.
• Discussion about handling coastline and showing oceans in tiles@home slippymap layer. Deelkar and Frederik are going to implement it but will have to discuss things with OJW first.
• Discussion about how to put to use an additional server that has been made available by a German research institution.

Many thanks to the sponsors for this event: The GRASS-Anwender Vereinigung as trustee for the FOSSGIS/OSGeo money gave us 500 EUR which payed for the bulk of the cost for staying at the Linuxhotel in Essen. And of course thanks to the Linuxhotel who charged us a fraction of what we would have had to pay somewhere else for a similar arrangement.

Also see the images section.