Live data from Hacker News

Why Book Corners won't sync contributions back to OpenStreetMap

andreagrandi.it

91–100 of 107 posts

Re: Why Book Corners won't sync contributions back to OpenStreetMap

#91
post #72

I run a website that's in a similar situation, and it sounds like the author is close to the correct solution, but needs to take things one step further: There needs to be a Single Point of Truth, and it should not be your little website. BigCentralThing should be the official database that knows about where all the Whatevers are. Your little Whatever Locator site should only ever _pull_ from them. Need a new Whateve…

This way you get less contributions.

I haven't seen this in practice. For my site, roughly 100% of the new additions to our database come from people climbing a route that's in the Big Database that we just don't know about yet.

It's just a matter of dropping a link to that route's page into an importer to scrape it in and have it be usable at our end.

But yeah, for a space where the Big Database didn't often have a record for the things your users want to add, I could see it being more of an issue.

Re: Why Book Corners won't sync contributions back to OpenStreetMap

#92

I run a website that's in a similar situation, and it sounds like the author is close to the correct solution, but needs to take things one step further: There needs to be a Single Point of Truth, and it should not be your little website. BigCentralThing should be the official database that knows about where all the Whatevers are. Your little Whatever Locator site should only ever _pull_ from them. Need a new Whateve…

Curious. You’re curating from the single point of truth (spot). You direct new additions for your site over to spot. How does a submission get into your subset? Does the submitter add to spot and then shoot you a message to pull by some unique id (author, submitter)? If you’re curating from their database, then spot doesn’t have the schema features to resolve to your subset by filtering alone, right?

Pretend the SPOT is youtube, for an example. Upload your video there, then drop a link to (any variation of) the url into this text field. A quick import script runs, and now we have the video in our database too. Or at least, a record with a link to it and whatever info we need to pull from it, along with extra fields we need to do whatever our website does.

It still lives in both places, but (assuming other websites also use the same Single Point Of Truth) if the title changes or whatever, everything stays synced up everywhere.

In my concrete example, bleau.info doesn't need to know that a given line has never had an ascent by anybody shorter than 165cm. So I write that down on my copy. But I don't need to track anything else about that line to use it and to link to Boolder, 27 Crags and 8a.nu's pages about it.

Re: Why Book Corners won't sync contributions back to OpenStreetMap

#93
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I highly doubt that. What tells do you see that lends to probability of it being llm generated content? Is it possible that we (myself included) have become conditioned to think content is llm generated as the default opinion?

Come on, the LLM language is all over the article: > The workflow I had in mind was deliberately cautious > The code was not the difficult part. > These requirements are not a one-time form to complete and forget. They create an ongoing responsibility around the account, the documented process, community feedback, failures, and potential reversions. Just a few examples. And yes, Pangram 4 also flags it as 100% LLM wr…

What about your examples has an llm tell?

I don't trust pangram 4 much. There was a post here earlier confirming it fails for many others.

Re: Why Book Corners won't sync contributions back to OpenStreetMap

#94
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how I would summarize it. OSM is only giving them two options: apply to be treated as an automated sync source, or don't submit at all. They're willing to put in work and care but not to handle all the other complex barriers.

There's another path that the author hasn't considered, which is making users contribute directly to OSM. To contribute a bookcase, ask them to create an OSM account, log in with OAuth, and send the edit straight to OSM. Book corners becomes just a custom view and editor over OSM data, instead of being its own database. Users are now responsible for the data they submit (OSM already has tools to deal with vandalism e…

Throwing out half the assistance the site is able to give and giving up control over the process is... technically an option...

Re: Why Book Corners won't sync contributions back to OpenStreetMap

#95
post #3

In summary: Because OSM requires work and care to be put into the data submission plan, which isn’t worth it. A project like OSM would be bombarded with spam and junk submissions if it didn’t have these barriers to submission. Understandable.

I get this perspective. But I also find the standards to be onerous. They were honestly fine until this one: > Contact the relevant local communities affected by the contributions Do I literally have to do new local community outreach every little town one of my bookcases shows up in? Ridiculous if so

No, and this is the issue I have with his write up. Yes all points listed are correct. But do they apply in the same rigor and depth for all imports, likely no. There is a difference between a tiger import or local government address data for thousands of buildings VS a few thousand street libraries. The community review process should/would consider this. I would also guess that it took some time to investigate all of the requirements and write it down. Might as well have written an import plan and discussed it :-)

Re: Why Book Corners won't sync contributions back to OpenStreetMap

#96
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on, the LLM language is all over the article: > The workflow I had in mind was deliberately cautious > The code was not the difficult part. > These requirements are not a one-time form to complete and forget. They create an ongoing responsibility around the account, the documented process, community feedback, failures, and potential reversions. Just a few examples. And yes, Pangram 4 also flags it as 100% LLM wr…

What about your examples has an llm tell? I don't trust pangram 4 much. There was a post here earlier confirming it fails for many others.

Perhaps you haven't used LLMs enough, this style is extremely common with Claude. And can you link me a Pangram 4 example where it has lots of false positives? The main reason why Pangram is supposed to be reliable in the first place is that they trade false positives for false negatives.

Re: Why Book Corners won't sync contributions back to OpenStreetMap

#97

I run a website that's in a similar situation, and it sounds like the author is close to the correct solution, but needs to take things one step further: There needs to be a Single Point of Truth, and it should not be your little website. BigCentralThing should be the official database that knows about where all the Whatevers are. Your little Whatever Locator site should only ever _pull_ from them. Need a new Whateve…

This can sometimes be a challenge with OSM, if the way you want to structure data doesn’t align with the way the community has decided to structure data. I was looking into building a canoeing map based on OSM data. An important thing to map is “is a particular stream between two lakes navigable by canoe?” OSM has a defined canoe=yes/no tag, but it’s supposed to be used for legal access, not navigability. In the plac…

What makes a stream navigable and what hinders it? Is it water depth? Is it width? Can those be mapped? Are there edge cases that some people might be able to navigate those waters and others not? Or during certain times?

If you work this out, you'll get there

Re: Why Book Corners won't sync contributions back to OpenStreetMap

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This can sometimes be a challenge with OSM, if the way you want to structure data doesn’t align with the way the community has decided to structure data. I was looking into building a canoeing map based on OSM data. An important thing to map is “is a particular stream between two lakes navigable by canoe?” OSM has a defined canoe=yes/no tag, but it’s supposed to be used for legal access, not navigability. In the plac…

It sounds like the real issue is the "stable ids" one. You need a Single Point of Truth that matches up stretches of waterway with an ID that won't change. You can then sprinkle .isNavigable and such onto your record along with a reference to that magic ID. But yeah, if they don't provide is, they're not a very good point of truth. I have to deal with this in my little bouldering database as well, since the source I…

OpenStreetMap does not and cannot offer permanent IDs. An entity might be mapped in more detail, resulting in something being split in two parts, or change from node to way, with wildly different IDs.

At the same time, a point might be repurposed as something else entirely.

Re: Why Book Corners won't sync contributions back to OpenStreetMap

#99
post #3

In summary: Because OSM requires work and care to be put into the data submission plan, which isn’t worth it. A project like OSM would be bombarded with spam and junk submissions if it didn’t have these barriers to submission. Understandable.

This is partially because they import into their own system, and then export->import into OSM. At that point, they're considered an integration which imports data. If their apps instead submitted directly to OSM (letting submission trickle back down), then the flow would fit into "user submission". Book Corners simply becomes an app though which the user performed the submission, rather than an intermediary exporting…

Such as what I make: https://mapcomplete.org/bookcases.html?

Re: Why Book Corners won't sync contributions back to OpenStreetMap

#100

Hello folks, author of Book Corners here. I just made the whole libraries db available for download (it's OBDL licensed). It's available from every users dashboard (it's a ~2 MB compressed GeoJSON file). It includes both libraries orignally imported from OSM and additional libraries added by users. While I still think the whole OSM process to submit back is a bit too much for the time I have available (but I still un…

How would you feel about integrating https://mapcomplete.org/bookcases.html? (which I make) as means of contribution?

This one sends data straight to OSM. I don't have my own database to "moderate", pictures are saved into a Panoramax-instance.

As users authenticate by logging in with OSM, the boring, risky legal stuff is handled by OpenStreetMap. Uploading images has a small print that says that their images will be reshared under CC-BY-SA.

The part where I suck is in creating a nice, polished website with extra pages, SEO, ...

Post reply on HN