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plepe / OpenStreetBrowser

An application to ‘browse’ the information in the displayed part of the map. Similar to common Wikis and also the main page of http://www.openstreetmap.org the website shows a narrow menu on the left side, most of the page is used for the display of the map. In contrast to most Wikis the menu is not static, but rather the content of the map can be browsed in categories. For the map a special style has been developed (sorry guys, I neither like the default Mapnik nor Osmarender styles), and special overlays are displayed to support the current browsed categories. When you click on an object (either from the list or directly on the map) informations on this object are displayed.
http://www.openstreetbrowser.org
GNU General Public License v3.0
85 stars 20 forks source link

Idea: Add UMap functionality to OpenStreetBrowser client #183

Open sbutler-gh opened 1 year ago

sbutler-gh commented 1 year ago

As a user, sometimes I would like to make collections of Points of Interest in OpenStreetBrowser not defined by search queries, but defined by custom selections. For example, a personally curated selection of restaurant and museums I would like to visit in a city. This collection of points of interest, probably represented by coordinate points in a map layer, could then be shared with others and accessed by others.

This is the functionality that https://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/ provides.

However, while uMap allows people to create collections of Points of Interest by coordinate points, these Points of Interest are just the coordinates themselves -- the points are not connected to OpenStreetMap data. I may create a map on uMap with my favorite restaurants in a city, but as I select the points on the map, uMap will only note the coordinates -- it will not tie those coordinates to the restaurant I am selecting, whose data may be on Open Street Map.

This seems like a notable improvement. When creating a custom collection of Points of Interest, if I click a location, the application can ask if I am selecting the OpenStreetMap object within X meters of that location. If so, I can confirm, and now I have a collection of Points of Interest that are tied to OpenStreetMap objects.

This may not fit the context of the current OpenStreetBrowser interface (e.g. including the "News" section and other legacy purposes), but it's a useful capability for end users that fits in the context of browsing OSM data. This could bring more people into the OpenStreetMap ecosystem, more people using OSM and OpenStreetBrowser, and more of a community contributing to it. And ultimately, make OpenStreetBrowser a more usable and capable tool for browsing and mapping with OpenStreetBrowser on a regular basis.

plepe commented 1 year ago

Actually, I have been thinking about such a functionality a lot. There are quite a few challenges though, e.g. authentication (so that I can save the collections in the user object), user interface, .... I don't want to make any promises about a timeline, but I guess, this will appear at one point in the future.

sbutler-gh commented 1 year ago

I have two thoughts on a simple way to start this:

  1. No authentication to start. A user's collection is associated with a given URL, and whoever accesses that URL can update the collection of objects. (This could probably solve a majority of cases, at least to start?)

  2. Password-based authentication. A user can add a password to a collection, and to edit the collection of objects, you must enter the password. This configuration could also apply to view settings (must enter a password to view the collection).

plepe commented 1 year ago

These are good ideas!

An alternative/additional idea: you can download the collection as an archive and upload it again when you need it.