What is osm-relatify and is there a problem with it?

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Yesterday morning I noticed that a couple of admin areas had “fallen out of the database”. What this normally means is that someone had broken the geometry, and sure enough that’s what Josm’s validator found.

What seems to have happened is a whole bunch of duplication of ways - I deleted the duplicates here and tried to reassigned the sprinkling of bus route relations that had appeared to the correct ways. The “created_by” is set to “osm-relatify git#91d26e5” which seems to be this.

Is this just a “better documentation needed” thing or is this a known issue?

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Relatify is a Website based on a JavaScript application supporting editing of PTv2 compatible public transport relations.

I haven’t yet noticed any problems like this using Relatify.

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I do not know much about osm-relatify but on GitHub - Zaczero/osm-relatify: 🚍 OpenStreetMap Public Transport Made Easy! — Web Editor, I read that it only supports public_transport:version=2 and the relation in question, https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/1253441, has this tag set but definitely is a public_transport:version=1.
So beside damaging data, it needs a better check what kind of relation is loaded and not only rely on public_transport:version=2 but e.g. check for roles backward and forward.

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Ping @NorthCrab as the author of OSM Relatify

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The (unnecessary) splitting of roads on the one hand (link 1 / link 2) and the duplication of identical ways (link 3) on the other are both known problems of the tool. At least the latter can be prevented if you wait about 5 minutes between two changes, as the data is obtained from Overpass as far as I know.

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Given that at least one of those has been an issue for over a year, based on the Github issue, perhaps this shouldn’t be in use on live data until the problem is fixed?

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iD did damage bus relations for years by simple splits of ways and it still was highly promoted as the recommended editor for beginners. Did you also propose that iD shouldn’t be used on live data back then or at least shouldn’t be promoted for beginners and display a big banner that it is damaging data?

Looking at Duplicated roundabout · Issue #32 · Zaczero/osm-relatify · GitHub, I would say it should be possible to deny any modification if the relation was already changed within the last ten minutes.

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I did spend quite a lot of time fixing “unfeasibly large buildings” at the time :slight_smile:

That’s just one tag though, and pales into insignificance compared to what I had to unpick today. Rather amusingly, it was Ireland’s “somewhat complex” multipolygon relations (not the bus routes) that flagged it to me.

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So did I in fixing bus routes after iD managed to add the new member at the wrong position or even worse jumbled all members if the relation did contain a loop.

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iD shouldn’t be used for editing relations until it has an active and responsive maintainer and it fixes bugs that break data such as this one.

Pass the :popcorn:.

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I was using Relatify to edit bus routes in the area a while ago. However, I was editing the PTV2 162 route. Clearly the tool is doing something to damage PTV1 routes in the area.

I have switched to manually adding the route relations now, due to encountering many problems with Relatify.

(Also of note is the fact that the 101 doesn’t go anywhere north of Drogheda, despite being mapped all the way to Belfast on OSM)

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