Learning OpenStreetMap easily with a chatbot

Room: Auditorium B - A101

Friday, 12:30
Duration: 20 minutes (plus Q&A)

• Aadesh Baral (Kathmandu Living Labs)

OSM Chatbot is an open-source chatbot application that aims to solve basic user queries related to OSM interactively and in an instant. With this application, we are trying to bring OSM related resources and tools together so that people can get OSM related information from one single tool without the need to go through the tiring process of searching the internet switching tabs on browsers, and waiting hours on forums just to solve their basic queries regarding OSM. In this talk, we will be sharing what made us realize the need for this application, how we built it, what challenges did we face, and plans for its future improvements.

The OpenStreetMap (OSM) community is constantly expanding. Over a 1.5million individuals have contributed data to it as per the stats page on the OSM Wiki. This network expands every day to include people with a wide range of interests and professions. There are numerous tools, technologies, and approaches being created to facilitate the contribution and use of OSM data. Even though there are forums, local social media networks, and wiki pages that can help users learn more about OSM, someone who is unfamiliar with the community and ecosystem may not be able to navigate the resources effectively. Trying to find relevant answers, switching pages, and waiting hours for forum responses can be a daunting task.

To address these issues, we developed an OSM chatbot that comes to the rescue. Chatbots are easily one of the most well-known examples of artificial intelligence (AI). A chatbot is an AI-based computer program that simulates human conversations. Chatbots are also known as digital assistants that understand human capabilities.

Kathmandu Living Labs, as a pioneer of OpenStreetMap in Nepal, is constantly working on community building and open-source data and software to benefit the OSM community around the world. From our over a decade experience of in community building and developing open-source tools around OSM, we realized a need for this chatbot application. We developed this chatbot with two major aims:

• Assist new users with basic OSM queries and introduce them to the community.
• Bringing all of the OSM tools together in one place. For example, displaying user contributions, locating tags, displaying events related to OSM, and forwarding to certain wiki pages and forums.

It is an open-source application developed using various open-source tools. Its source code is available on Github.