Working Group Minutes/EWG 2023-09-06

From OpenStreetMap Foundation

Formal proceedings

Attendees:

  • Andrew Hain
  • Adam Hoyle
  • Tobias Knerr
  • Roland Olbricht (late)
  • Emerson Rocha

Apologies

  • Salim Baidoun

Membership Application

The group decides unanimously to decline a new member based on that there is no evidence that the person has done actual mapping, has written OpenStreetMap relevant software, or any other OSM related contribution.

Actual business

Website work

Tobias has communicated the decision taken at the previous meeting to Sarah.

Test Double

Adam will connect with Robert about handing over the TestDouble contact.

"Nominatim Special Phrases, Overpass-Turbo Wizard and beyond" / OSM data intent

Emerson gives a presentation about potential re-use of information about intrinsic data structures (like tagging rules) between various tools. The presentation is intended to be informational, no action is required.

After discussion by mail, one "low hanging fruit" found common features between OSM tools which could be generalized. Emerson plans to receive comments on the document "Nominatim Special Phrases, Overpass-Turbo Wizard and beyond" / OSM data intent on the next meeting.

Overture Maps

Andrew shares his observations after doing an analysis on Overture Maps data. This starts a discussion on confidence levels for POI in Overture. There is not necessarily a correlation between confidence value and actual quality or correctness. It seems to vary from place to place whether there is a confidence level such that above that level the POIs are reliable and already complete, or whether the actual POIs stray widely over the confidence levels with fake POIs interspersed.

The has been the tool Overture Places Quality Analysis to review the data. The community is observing the developments and opportunities, although interest seems to have waned for the moment.

No immediate action is required. The Engineering Working group shall revisit the topic once there are some interesting new developments.

Discourse

The forums governance team has reached out about the possibility to fund work on Discourse (the open source software used for the Foundation-hosted OSM forum at community.openstreetmap.org) through Eningeering Working Group. This is intended for features that cater for needs on community.osm.org, but ultimately are improvements to Discourse in general.

Opinions expressed in the discussion:

It is not the EWG's expertise what is important and what not. The governance team should do that. The EWG is happy to help with implementation, the EWG would also be ok if the governance team does this on their own. If the work is costly relative to the EWG budget, then it might be necessary to jointly request funding from board for the specific task.

Any other business

Community debate on osm-carto

The Engineering Working Group decides to watch [a discussion on community https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/osm-carto-maintainers-refusing-to-render-approved-highway-busway/103289] that currently attracts a lot of complaining about missing things in OpenStreetMap base layer cartography to see whether any of the identified problems are actionable.

Vector tiles

The Engineering Working Group has already recommended that this is funded. From the EWG's perspective it is no longer moving forward at the board level.

The EWG decides to ask the board to take this over before it is left undone. Roland will approach the (rest of the) board about this.

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