Fwd: [OSM-talk] Who Did It?

[Mike Dupont]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ilya Zverev <zve...@textual.ru>
Date: Sat, Sep 29, 2012 at 10:24 AM
Subject: [OSM-talk] Who Did It?
To: Talk <ta...@openstreetmap.org>


Hi!

For a long time now, there has been no tool to properly monitor an area. Essentially the only way of doing it is to filter changeset history by bbox (thanks to Pavel for his RSS filter btw). OWL has been turned off, ITO-like visualizations are pretty but unuseful. The simple question "who has deleted my road?" turned out to be very hard to answer.

But there has been a simple solution, that I'm amazed no one has come to before. To cut long story short, I present to you the service to answer the frequently asked question: WHO DID IT?

http://zverik.osm.rambler.ru/whodidit/

It basically downloads hourly replication diffs and stores information on affected 0.01-degree tiles, along with extra information, like user name or a number of modified objects. Then it is possible to do some analysis of that data, to rid users of doing it themselves: which changesets should they pay most attention to, where was anything deleted, and which tiles have only got new data.

Obviously this service relies only on nodes: other objects do not have spatial information on them in diffs; querying the server every time is expensive, and keeping minutely planet database is no less costly. I've preloaded WHODIDIT with the data since 1st of July, and it's only one gigabyte per three months of changes (half of which are indices). Yes, you can see what redaction bot has touched.

Also it allows to make RSS feed similar to OWL's. I think everything is pretty straightforward, and there is an instruction picture:

http://zverik.osm.rambler.ru/whodidit/wdi_guide.gif

The source is licensed WTFPL, and it should be very easy to set up, for example, a mirror or a regional version of this service. It's entirely in Perl/PHP/MySQL. Check it at https://github.com/Zverik/whodidit

Oh, and if you see no tiles, try zooming in, levels 12-13 should have everything. I've not yet figured how to pass error messages to the front-end, so there is no helpful message.

Thanks,
IZ

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James Michael DuPont
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