tracks posting via api

traveller-tracks · 2009-01-22T10:13:29.000Z

Hi everybody,

I’ve just registered to this project.
To introduce myself, I run a website where travellers are able to present their journeys they’ve made or they are doing at the moment. They upload their gpx-files to visualize their progress. For me it should be no problem to forward these files to the gpx post api but I can’t ensure the needed quality (i.e. timestamp, cleared tracks, was it onroad…) of the tracks.

I like to know, if it would be a gain to OSM anyway or will it raise more problems than solutions?

Sometimes I also have informations about the road conditions of the specific track. Would this be useful and how should I post that?

Cheers Peter

P.S.: Hope this is the right place for this posting.

Richard · 2009-01-23T08:19:35.000Z

Generally, the more the merrier.

It’s absolutely crucial that copyrighted data isn’t uploaded to OSM, and if users have been using a GPS receiver with “snap to road” turned on, it’s possible that their data is unwittingly copyrighted. So you might want to add some text explaining that and offer an opt-out for such users. That said, most of your tracks look like they’re in Africa, and IMX most GPSs don’t have many roads marked in Africa!

For road conditions, you’re into full-blown editing - lots more about that on the wiki.

You’ll get some help here but you might get more on the mailing lists.

traveller-tracks · 2009-01-23T10:34:15.000Z

Thank you for the answer Richard,

the opt-out was exactly what I had in mind, but I didn’t knew that copyright trick of the map vendors. Is that just a “theoretical” problem or are those tracks tagged, even when you export them to gpx? I guess this is already discussed exhaustive, I will use the search for that.

I don’t feel like editing all that tracks uploaded to my site, but I saw it is possible to apply appropriate tags to gpx files.

Thanks again

Peter

emj · 2009-01-23T11:52:37.000Z

traveller-tracks:

Is that just a “theoretical” problem or are those tracks tagged, even when you export them to gpx?

“Snap to road” is a real problem, the resulting GPX will be completly destroyed and it not raw data anymore. Very sad, because it can be really troublesome for many uses, that need raw data, other than Openstreetmap. You could always upload the tracks with the tag “maybesnaptoroad” :-).

PS. I’m not 100% sure what you ment by “are those tracks tagged” so I hope I got geist of it.

Lambertus · 2009-01-23T13:08:35.000Z

emj:

You could always upload the tracks with the tag “maybesnaptoroad” :-).

Unfortunately you can almost never tell from which tracklogs you are seeing the trackpoints in our editors, therefore you cannot know if ‘snap to road’ was enabled, thus introduce copyrighted data (which is possibly wrong too) in our database…