lack of ergonomics for osm->ohm transfer

[Marc-marc-marc]

last week, i wanted to create my first object in ohm. confirmed osm contributor, i thought it would be easy:

ergonomic issue 1 : almost nothing exists in OHM. it's useless to have a special OHM nominatim if the street doesn't exist, if the district doesn't exist, if the city doesn't exist.
so instead of creating the desired object, i thought i would import the place=city first.
I go to osm, modify with josm, I select the desired object, I have the knowledge to add the start_date

ergonomic issue 2 :
taginfo ohm : I have to search on the wiki to find the taginfo ohm to copy/paste the attribution and the license with the same typography.

ergonomic issue 3 :
send the osm object to ohm : you have to lose the osm version id.
no problem for someone who already played to duplicate a node. if it had been a set of several ways, it would have been less fun.
in the end all this took a lot of time and I stopped before creating the intended object. it would have been faster to create the object in an osm layer and send it to ohm

Suggestion:

• import in OHM the minimum elements needed to find a localisation (place=* and important road) ?
• have a josm plugin that takes care of the repetitive tasks (api, attribution, license)
• in a next step, the plugin could manage "delete it from osm, send to ohm" workflow

[1ec5]

Thanks for writing up your experiences here! When you first mentioned these issues on the talk list, I thought you were referring to ergonomic issues mapping in OHM in general. But from an OSM contributor’s standpoint, you’re right that there’s a huge psychological barrier when OHM looks so blank and it isn’t straightforward to copy things directly from OSM to OHM. This blank page kept me from contributing to OHM for years, until something snapped and I got hooked. The same thing happened to me many years earlier in OSM.

import in OHM the minimum elements needed to find a localisation (place=* and important road) ?

There have been local efforts to import places and roads into OHM. Start dates of places are much easier to come by than start dates of roads. (I’ve resorted to resurveying my neighborhood looking for sidewalk stamps to ascertain the ages of streets around me.) Boundaries and landuse areas are also very helpful for orienting yourself on the map. In the U.S., we’ve already imported admin_level=4 historic boundaries and #418 tracks admin_level=6 boundaries. My local community has even imported admin_level=8 boundaries (codeforsanjose/OSM-SouthBay#28) and parks.

#275 proposed a wholesale import of OSM into OHM. start_date would be set to the date of the import, and then mappers would backdate features one by one as they research their histories. Technically this would be doable, but it also runs into the project’s goal of being more permissively licensed than ODbL. The audience for historical geography is fundamentally different than for present-day geography,¹ so the incentives and disincentives in the ODbL aren’t as well suited for this project.

have a josm plugin that takes care of the repetitive tasks (api, attribution, license)

This is a great idea. OSM contributors retain the copyright to their contributions to the extent that they represent new authorship.² So if I trace a building in OSM from scratch, not based on anything else in OSM, then nothing would legally stop me from also contributing the same work to OHM. Using JOSM, it is possible to transfer data from OSM to OHM by juggling accounts, but a plugin could make it easier.

It would be awesome if OHM iD could have a built-in feature for automatically transferring an individual object after verifying the history. It reminds me of the transwiki process that Wikipedia developed for Wiktionary and Wikimedia Commons. An online workflow via iD would be useful for OSM mappers who want to send stuff to OHM but don’t want to get too involved with OHM.

By the way, when I joined OHM, I was startled to see that the map of my hometown wasn’t blank, that in fact changeset 1 by  osmosis_user_0 long ago imported, among many other things, some of my first waterway and boundary edits from OSM. Does anyone know more about this import? How widespread was it? Maybe only certain features touched only by OSM users who declared their contributions to be in the public domain?

Footnotes

1. I tried to drum up interest in autonomous car routing based on long-gone roads, but no one was interested. ↩

2. The OSM contributor terms grant OSMF a “non-exclusive … license”. ↩

[1ec5]

Using JOSM, it is possible to transfer data from OSM to OHM by juggling accounts, but a plugin could make it easier.

By the way, this process is documented on the wiki:

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nonexistent_features#Transferring_a_feature_from_OpenStreetMap_to_OpenHistoricalMap