Grants talk:IdeaLab/OSMdata: a Wikidata-like editor for OpenStreetMap

This is a big idea

I am having difficulty understanding what is proposed but the mere inter-compatibility of Wikidata and OSM would be a very big deal. Could you please simplify this explanation even more and say way this matters now? Blue Rasberry (talk) 12:57, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

I agree, it's a bit hard to understand the project right now. It would be best if the creator could give some concrete examples of how it would be used, and to explain how this would be better than the structure we already have today (keys wikipedia=* and wikidata=* in OSM). --179.179.155.229 15:54, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

I think for example it might give an answer to the question "what grocery stores are open now within 1 km away from me?", "how many monuments in the X city?". Also, you can edit these data directly on wiki and they will be synchronized with the OSM database. Probably will also be made to specify additional data that can not be stored in the database OSM such as photos or ... Well, I do not really know :-) I believe that, in any case, we should start with something simple. I am also sure there is no need to synchronize databases, we need to read data from the OSM database and write it back. But this is my idea, it is difficult to understand what author is meant... --Pastakhov (talk) 11:11, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

The first two things you pointed out are already possible in OSM using tools such as Overpass Turbo and the Level0 editor. Nowadays we use wikimedia commons to store things, but I would say there is indeed space for a substitute, because wikimedia commons can be lacking in some ways for OSM needs. One other thing that is lacking in OSM is an external database similar do wikidata that doesn't have a notability requirement, which would allow people to specify precisely and without possible ambiguity that such and such object is owned by such owner, and so on (nowadays this is simple done using words, and not unique identifiers (when there is no wikidata id)). --189.26.155.85 12:54, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Could the project be broken into some small projects to test? Pastakhov talked about monuments. Wikipedia covers those very well, and it would be nice to merely have some system linking OSM to the Wikipedia articles for them and Wikipedia also linking to an OSM map showing the location of the monuments. Even fundamental interconnectivity needs work and I would like to see that go smoothly. Blue Rasberry (talk) 15:41, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

I'm still not sure what the main project is about, so I can't say. There already exists links between OSM and Wikidata though. See http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Wikidata for an overview. Also, as far as I know, the French and German Wikipedia already integrate OSM objects in an Wikipedia article --189.26.155.85 16:16, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

┌─────────┘
@Bluerasberry:, @Pastakhov: I am sorry for this much delaied answer. I know that there are several efforts to link Wikipedia, Wikidata and OpenStreetMap but my approach here was trying to use an existing platform (Wikibase) for editing another project. For example we had DBpedia way before Wikidata but it wasn't until we had a project that was truly integrated with Mediawiki that we started exploring a more tight integration between a repository of data and the projects. This is the basic idea behind this proposal, which I know to be challenging (there were as of September 2014 60x more object in OSM that items in Wikidata). For the OSM community this probably would be (if it works as intended) "yet another editor" for OpenStreetMap, not a replacement of any of the existing tools or information. --CristianCantoro (talk) 00:35, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Added value

This idea as it is presented now cannot get enough support because it doesn't offer a high enough return of investment, or at least it is not explained well enough to OSM'ers what are the advantadges of having a semantic database of entities. A more practical approach could be to focus on managing an integration between wikivoyage and OSM, since both projects would benefit much more from each other. --Micru (talk) 10:49, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

Hi Micru, thanks for your point of view. I point out above in the answer to Blueraspberry and Pastakhov the main idea behind this proposal, and I can see that OSM editors can perceive this as just "yet another editor" for OSM. It would be interesting, though, in my opinion, to have an interface to edit Wikidata where there is a big community and many tools that have already been developed to manipulate the data. As I point out above in some sense this looks to me like the difference between DBpedia and Wikidata where the advantage of the second is the fact that it is integrated more tightly (and use the same software) with the other Wikimedia projects. --CristianCantoro (talk) 00:39, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

(also, I want to point out that you are not alone with this concerns, see this message from Simon Poole on the osm-talk list. (This is for reference to everybody else since you were participating in that thread :P)) --CristianCantoro (talk) 00:50, 11 March 2015 (UTC)

Nodes/Ways/Relations

Nodes, Ways and Relations. Those are the primitives we have currently in OSM. The way I see it, it would be interesting to have something like Adresses, Streets, Public_transport_stops, Bus/Tram/Train lines, Route_variations, etc.

These "Primitives" would contain pointers to the N, W and R primitives that are currently used and that were previously used as componenets of the higher level Primitives. It's these higher level primitives that may make sense to store in a WD instance.

In a way we already do parts of this using relations. What relations don't offer is the historic part of the data. Digging into the history of OSM primitives is a very hard thing to do. Overpass API solves part of that problem.

For the above proposal it's important to keep the WD instance up-to-date with the minutely diffs.

At the moment the best way to "marry" OSM and WD is by adding wikidata and *:wikidata to the OSM primitives. There is still a lot work to be done there.

If such a WD instance dedicated to OSM ever takes hold, it may be interesting to cross link Wikidata to/from it.

--Polyglot (talk) 17:47, 10 March 2015 (UTC)

Hi Polyglot, as I point out in the proposal this system should be synced with the main OSM database, and at the end of the day it would in fact provide a new editor for OpenStreetMap. My main curiosity is to see what happens if you use a tool (Wikibase) where there is a big and dedicated community that has built tools for manioulating data and make other data (OSM data, in particular) available through the same "interface". --CristianCantoro (talk) 00:45, 11 March 2015 (UTC)