Tasking Manager Repeat Validation Analysis 2026
This document is a work in progress and is barely started.
During 2025, members of the DQC&A WG discussed various ideas to reduce the problematic impact of tasks requiring repeated validation as a consequence of tasks being resubmitted as complete without undergoing any mapping change. A proposal was made to change the order of the Tasking Manager (TM) tabs to ensure that any comment history is presented to mappers in the hope that they read and act upon comments, rather than resubmitting to what might appear to a new mapper as a complete task.
Task resubmission with no change tends to result in rapid invalidation and the potential for several cycles of resubmission and invalidation before the task is finally validated. These cycles are likely to be undertaken by new mappers who never return to HOT after their first mapping experience. The mapping to attain validation is likely to have been undertaken by the validator, thus mapper skills may not improve. This analysis attempts to analyse the volumes of tasks that are repeatedly invalidated to provide evidence of the scale of the problem and to determine if any proposed solutions have a beneficial effect.
Summary
Process
Database
To undertake the analysis, PostgreSQL 18.4.1 was installed on Ubuntu 24.04. The extension PostGIS 3.6.3 was also required. pgAdmin 4 was used to manage the analysis using SQL scripts. The writer was not familiar with the use and administration of PostgreSQL prior to this analysis. The following notes to install and setup PostgreSQL may not be the most efficient or secure.
PostgreSQL was installed based on the notes found here https://neil.computer/notes/how-to-install-postgresql-in-a-custom-directory/ ;
install postgresql
install postgis
install pgAdmin
The analysis was carried out on a private computer with local storage. Consequently the trust elements within the PostgreSQL configuration file 'pg_hba.conf' were configured as follows;
# DO NOT DISABLE!
# If you change this first entry you will need to make sure that the
# database superuser can access the database using some other method.
# Noninteractive access to all databases is required during automatic
# maintenance (custom daily cronjobs, replication, and similar tasks).
#
# Database administrative login by Unix domain socket
local all postgres trust
# TYPE DATABASE USER ADDRESS METHOD
# "local" is for Unix domain socket connections only
local all all trust
# IPv4 local connections:
host all all 127.0.0.1/32 trust
# IPv6 local connections:
host all all ::1/128 trust
# Allow replication connections from localhost, by a user with the
# replication privilege.
local replication all peer
host replication all 127.0.0.1/32 scram-sha-256
host replication all ::1/128 scram-sha-256
Data Source
The initial analysis of project tasks was carried out on a SQL dump of the TM database dated 3 November 2025.
To import the SQL file the following actions should be carried out;
- Create a database