filter for edit history

eric22 · 2012-06-20T16:16:19.000Z

Looking at the OSM edit history for a region I’m interested in, I see it is extremely cluttered by changesets where the changeset bounding box contains the region, even though nothing was actually edited in the region. To take a recent example, http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/changeset/11954514 covers a large fraction of the world even though it contains just two edits of single points, neither of which is geographically relevant to vast majority of users. In the region I last checked, the most recent 14 edits were all of this type.

I wonder if/how the interface could be modified to exclude such changesets.

The first method I can think of is to exclude changesets which do not have any points/lines in the desired region. A possible downside of this is excluding edits of large features, for example national boundaries, which are relevant to users in a smaller region. Also it might require a large increase in server processing power.

A second method would be to exclude any edit that is larger that a certain large size (like 10 degrees lat/lon).

Either way, excluding these data should be an option (by checkbox) rather than forced behavior. But as long as it’s still possible to see every changeset, I think an option to “exclude non-local edits” or “exclude very large edits” would be helpful and informative.

Thoughts?

Vclaw · 2012-06-20T18:18:16.000Z

Have a look at OWL (OpenStreetMap Watch List): http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OWL_%28OpenStreetMap_Watch_List%29
It only shows changes in a particular area. Though it seems OWL is currently down, I don’t know when it will be working again.

For your second method, see http://positron96.appspot.com/osmfilter.html
I’ve not tried it myself yet, it should exclude any large changesets from the RSS feed.

There have been suggestions of adding something like these to the main history tab on openstreetmap.org, though I don’t know if there is any progress with that.

Tordanik · 2012-06-20T20:29:45.000Z

Vclaw:

For your second method, see http://positron96.appspot.com/osmfilter.html
I’ve not tried it myself yet, it should exclude any large changesets from the RSS feed.

It works well, and it was introduced in this forum only a few days ago: http://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=16962

OWL is more sophisticated and I have used it for a long time, but it doesn’t work properly at the moment.