OWL (OpenStreetMap Watch List)
OWL is a service for looking at what's changed in OSM where you're interested in. Rather than calculate the bounding box of all changes in a changeset, this service attaches changes to small lat/lon tiles, which are more fine-grained and more easily queryable (in theory, anyway...)
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Status
OWL is experimental software and there is a development instance running on Errol. It's currently running with some performance problems. You may need to wait a long time to see anything appear on the viewer map.
Services
Maps of changes
There are maps of changes over the last day, week or forever (well, since OWL started running). The map for forever covers almost all the tiles in any frequently-edited area, so isn't very useful.
RSS feeds of changes
On the bottom left of the maps of changes should be a control to allow you to select an RSS feed which will contain only those changes touching tiles actually in that box. So no more sorting through (big) changesets to find which actually modify features near you! Note that there is a maximum size limit on the area for RSS feeds, although you should be able to monitor a city-sized area without problems.
Duplicate nodes
The duplicate nodes map uses the change information generated by OWL to make it possible to keep a minutely-up-to-date map of all duplicate nodes (nodes with the same position) in OSM.
Development
OWL is extremely experimental, and there's basically no documentation on how to set it up. Hopefully that will change sometime soon, but in the meantime the source is here: [1].
Feature Requests
- trust networks
- filter out, or group, trusted users (based on friends in osm app or other)
- analyze experience of users. filter in only newer users.
- filtering on types of changes
- node movements above a certain tolerance
- certain kinds of features
- show the areas that a currently not watched
- areas where there is no rss/atom feed that gets pulled regularly
- easy way to find areas that needs some sort of monitoring
- watch individual relations
- some want to monitor large objects like state boundaries, but a bounding box would inundate the user with changes
- recurse at least one or two levels to check if child objects have been changed
