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Is there a way to download or stream changes made that include geographic data locating the user who made the change, where the change was made, and other information about what the change consisted of? |
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You can download changesets - either directly for the whole planet, or processed from this for various regions (e.g. geofabrik's changesets for Europe). The format is identical - these are all the changesets that have been uploaded in a given timeframe (minute,hour,day). The data includes the coordinates of changed objects, change timestamp, and user ID. You would need to query the API to get full changeset metadata (e.g. editor used, changeset message, discussion, tagging, etc.) Excellent! I've worked with changesets in the past but didn't know they had historical data. Thank you.
(18 Jan '16, 16:21)
abbreed
You're welcome. I'm not sure how far the historical data goes ( http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Changeset#Technical would imply April 2009 ).
(18 Jan '16, 16:25)
Piskvor
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If you're interested in a particular local area you might find trim_osc.py in https://github.com/Zverik/regional useful. If you want to figure out a user's current location then I can't think of a way, though I occasionally look at http://hdyc.neis-one.org/ to see where a user's "home region" is.
(18 Jan '16, 16:40)
SomeoneElse ♦
@SomeoneElse: Sure, that's going to correlate with the user's usual physical location (modulo Humanitarian Openstreetmap Team, MapRoulette etc.).
(18 Jan '16, 16:48)
Piskvor
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Do you mean that you also want to know where the user was? How is that relevant? (For example, I rarely map directly from the location mapped, as my preferred editor is jOSM, and I prefer not to carry a desktop computer in meatspace) If that's what you're asking, this data is not collected with the edits.
Example: Leon is in Moscow, Russia and edits buildings in Nicosia, Cyprus. Could you return the coordinates for Moscow and Nicosia? I know the latter is possible but after doing research it doesn't appear that the editors geographic location is being tracked.
User location is definitely not a part of the metadata (and the more I think about it, the more I think including it by default would be a Really Bad Idea).