mr-cli MapRoulette Command Line Interface Utility

The mr-cli package provides a mr command-line utility intended to offer various tools for working with MapRoulette.

Use mr --help for a list of top-level commands, and mr <command> --help for usage and options available for a specific command.

Prerequisites

• Node.js (v12.15 LTS or higher)
• npm

Installation

Installing globally allows you to run the mr command from anywhere.

npm install -g @maproulette/mr-cli

Upgrading

Repeating the installation command will upgrade a global copy to the latest version.

npm install -g @maproulette/mr-cli

Creating Cooperative Challenges

Cooperative challenges associate existing, uncomitted, in-progress work with each task. That work is then presented to MapRoulette mappers for final completion or verification.

The mr cooperative command can be used to generate GeoJSON with cooperative tasks suitable for upload to MapRoulette during creation of a new challenge. It requires the desired type of cooperative tasks to be specified: change for standard cooperative tasks with attached change files, which allows for inclusion of unrestricted edits; or tag for special tag-only fixes that can be completed and committed to OpenStreetMap fully within MapRoulette without need for an external editor.

One or more change files -- either saved JOSM (.osm) files or OSMChange (.osc) files -- must be given as the final parameter to the mr cooperative command. The files will be processed and "line-by-line GeoJSON" suitable for uploading to MapRoulette during challenge creation will be output.

By default, the GeoJSON is written to the standard output. You can easily specify the name of an output file instead with the --out parameter.

⚠️ the mr cooperative command is EXPERIMENTAL. Please carefully and diligently inspect the generated tasks as this tool almost certainly contains bugs

JOSM Workflow

1. Make edits in JOSM
2. Save file -- don't upload to OSM. If you want full control over which edits go into each task, save the work for each task into its own file
3. Use mr cooperative with your saved JOSM file(s) to generate a MapRoulette challenge file
4. Create a new MapRoulette challenge and choose to upload a local file, providing the challenge file

Generating Cooperative Tasks with Attached Change Files

Basic Syntax:

mr cooperative change [--out <challenge-file>] [--bijective] [--dev] <input-files..>

To generate a standard cooperative challenge with tasks containing unrestricted changes represented by one or more change files (either JOSM .osm or OSMChange .osc), use the mr cooperative change command. The work-in-progress changes will be served to the mapper in their editor during task completion so that they can finish or verify the work. Final work is then saved to OSM by the mapper through their editor just as they would for their own edits in a normal task.

JOSM files do not organize individual edits into groups, so, by default, each top-level modification found in the JOSM file(s) (that is, modifications not referenced by other modifications in the same file) will be represented as a single task in the challenge file. For example, if the file contained new buildings where each building had new nodes and a new way that referenced those nodes as members, then tasks would only be created for the new ways (and not the new nodes since they are referenced by the ways).

If you need more control over which modifications are grouped into which task, then save each group of related modifications into its own file and use the --bijective option to create one task per file.

OSMChange (.osc) files do allow for some basic grouping of individual modifications, and so all edits in each "action" group will be represented as a single task. For more control, separate the related modifications into their own files and use the --bijective option, just as with JOSM files.

Sometimes elements in a change file reference other elements for which the data isn't included in the file. mr often needs the data in order to generate correct GeoJSON geometry for the task, and so in that case it will contact OSM and fetch the referenced element data when needed.

If your change file is based on data from the OSM dev servers, then you also need to add the --dev flag so that the OSM dev servers are contacted instead of the production servers

Example 1: Adding new, unrelated OSM nodes

Assume some new benches (nodes) are to be added. As each edit (node addition) stands on its own, we can save all of these together in a single JOSM file if desired, and will have every edit turned into a separate MapRoulette task.

We will read input data from a new_benches.osm JOSM file we saved and have the outputted challenge GeoJSON saved to a file called new_bench_challenge.json.

mr cooperative change --out new_bench_challenge.json new_benches.osm

Example 2: Adding related, heirarchical modifications

Now we wish to add some buildings, which will include new nodes and a way for each building. Even though each building contains multiple new OSM elements -- nodes and a way -- these additions are heirarchical, with the nodes playing a supporting role for the way. mr will generate new tasks only for the top-level changes (the ways in this case), and will simply bundle in the supporting changes (the nodes) rather than creating separate tasks for them.

mr cooperative change --out new_buildings_challenge.json new_buildings.osm

Example 3: Manually grouping related modifications together

Sometimes the default behavior doesn't group modifications into tasks quite the way you'd like, and so full control over which modifications end up together in each task is needed. This can be done by saving each group of related modifications together into its own file and then feeding all the files in with the --bijective option to create a one-to-one mapping from files to tasks in the outputted GeoJSON. This gives you complete control over what ends up in each task.

One real-world example at the time of writing would be adjusting building outlines by repositioning their nodes. Since the building's way is not itself part of the changes -- only the nodes -- each modified node will be top-level and, therefore, would by default become a separate task. The mr tool isn't smart enough (yet!) to realize that multiple modified nodes are part of the same (unmodified) way and should perhaps be grouped together. We obviously don't want a separate task for each node in this case, so the solution is to save each modified building into its own file and use the --bijective option.

We'll assume we saved our files as building_1.osm, building_2.osm, etc. The naming doesn't matter as long as you can easily reference all the files -- we'll do so here using wildcards. We'll save the challenge GeoJSON to a file called outlines_challenge.json.

mr cooperative change --out outlines_challenge.json --bijective building*.osm

Generating Cooperative Tasks with Tag-Only Fixes

Basic Syntax:

mr cooperative tag [--out <challenge-file>] [--dev] <input-files..>

If your changes consist purely of tag fixes, an alternative "tag fix" (formerly quick fix) style cooperative challenge can be generated instead with the mr cooperative tag command. MapRoulette will present the proposed tag changes to mappers during task completion and allow them to approve or reject the changes within MapRoulette, as well as modify the tags if needed. Approved changes are submitted directly to OSM by MapRoulette itself, removing the need for external editors.

One or more change files must be provided. Note that only one edit can be represented by each tag fix cooperative task, so each modification found in the change file(s) will be represented as a single task in the challenge file. There is no ability to manually group edits for tag fix tasks, and any grouping in an OSMChange file will be ignored.

Tag-fixes for each task are computed by comparing the proposed state in the change file with the versions of OpenStreetMap data referenced in the file (which may not necessarily be the very latest version at the time mr is run) and then analyzing the differences.

If your change file is based on data from the OSM dev servers, then you also need to add the --dev flag so that the OSM dev servers are contacted instead of the production servers

When the tag fix is presented to a mapper in MapRoulette, the latest OSM data will first be fetched so that only pertinent tag changes are shown to the mapper.

Attaching Data To Tasks

MapRoulette v3.6.5 and above support data attachments to tasks. Please see the MapRoulette docs for details on what kinds of attachments are supported.

The mr-cli utility can be used to add attachments to tasks in an existing line-by-line GeoJSON file, producing a new GeoJSON file with the attachments included.

Attachment files are matched to tasks based on specified feature properties, attachment filenames, and optional match patterns.

Basic Syntax:

mr attach task [--in <challenge-file>] [--out <challenge-file>] <kind|as-is> <auto-detect|type> <file-pattern> [property-pattern] [property] [format] [encode]

Example 1: Attach GPX reference layers based on OSM id

Assume that we have a my_challenge.geojson file and that each task has an osmid feature property formatted like n1234, n5678, etc., and that our respective attachment files are named attachment_n1234.gpx, attachment_n5678.gpx, and so on.

In order for mr-cli to know how to match up which file with which task, it's necessary to provide a file pattern that shows mr-cli how to build the filename for each task based on the value of a feature property. In this case, we need to tell mr-cli to use the value of the osmid property in the filename, which we can do by surrounding it with curly braces as so: attachment_{osmid}.gpx

Note: only one property may be referenced in a filename pattern

So here is our full command. We'll output the updated challenge to an updated_challenge.geojson and we'll also use the --auto-detect option to automatically detect that we're working with GPX files.

mr attach task --in my_challenge.geojson --out updated_challenge.geojson --kind referenceLayer --auto-detect --file-pattern 'attachment_{osmid}.gpx'

Example 2: Attaching multiple reference layers to tasks

Building on Example 1 above, the file pattern can include wildcard characters that can be used to match multiple files. All matching files will be included as attachments. Perhaps we have both a GPX layer and an OSM layer for each task.

⚠️ to match different types of files you must use the --auto-detect option. If an explicit type is specified instead, all matching files will be treated as that type

Our command is the same as in example 1, but includes a * for the file extension to potentially match multiple files per osmid:

Patterns should be surrounded by single quotes when used on the command line to avoid potential conflicts with special shell characters

mr attach task --in my_challenge.geojson --out updated_challenge.geojson --kind referenceLayer --auto-detect --file-pattern 'attachment_{osmid}.*'

Example 3: Extracting only relevant parts of property value

Building on Example 1, what if our osmid property was instead formatted as node/1234, node/4567 while our files were still named attachment_n1234.gpx, attachment_n5678.gpx, and so on? We'll need to extract the first letter of the type as well as the numeric id. mr-cli makes that possible through property patterns.

Property patterns are standard regular expressions, and you can use capture groups (parentheses) to extract just parts of the property value. Only the captured parts will be substituted into the filename pattern (in the order in which they are captured).

Here is a regular expression that will capture the first letter ("word" character), ignore everything that follows that isn't a digit, and then capture all the remaining digits: (\w)[^\d]+(\d+)

Note: when a property pattern is used, only tasks with a matching value will be considered. That means property patterns can also be used to limit attachments to matching tasks even if you don't need to use capture groups

We'll use this in our command. This is the same command as in Example 1 except now we specify a --property-pattern option with our regular expression

Note: backslashes need to be escaped when used on the command line and therefore appear as \\ when regular expressions are shown in example mr-cli commands

mr attach task --in my_challenge.geojson --out updated_challenge.geojson --kind referenceLayer --auto-detect --property-pattern '(\\w)[^\\d]+(\\d+)' --file-pattern 'attachment_{osmid}.gpx'

Example 4: More control over the filename pattern

In Example 3, we were able to continue referencing {osmid} in our filename pattern because we were lucky to want exactly the captured data in exactly the order it appeared in the property value. That may not always be the case, and it can be useful to have more control over where each captured portion of the property value appears in your filename.

Building on Example 3, let's assume our filenames are instead named attachment_node_1234.gpx, attachment_node_4567.gpx, etc. We now need to capture the full OSM type and the numeric id, but separate them with an underscore in the filename pattern.

Our updated property pattern: (\w+)[^\d]+(\d+) Our updated filename pattern: attachment_\1_\2.gpx

Since our filename pattern no longer refers to osmid explicitly, we also need to provide a --property option that tells mr-cli to look at the osmid property.

mr attach task --in my_challenge.geojson --out updated_challenge.geojson --kind referenceLayer --auto-detect --property osmid --property-pattern '(\\w+)[^\\d]+(\\d+)' --file-pattern 'attachment_\\1_\\2.gpx'

Example 5: Specifying an explicit file type

So far we've always used the --auto-detect option, which inspects the actual attachment data (not the filename) to try to determine what type of file it represents. You can also explicitly specify the type if you want. Note, however, that only one type can be specified.

Here is the command from Example 1 with the gpx type explicitly specified:

mr attach task --in my_challenge.geojson --out updated_challenge.geojson --kind referenceLayer --type gpx --file-pattern 'attachment_{osmid}.xml'

Example 6: Attaching blobs

MapRoulette supports attachments of arbitrary data as blobs. These are intended for attachments that are to be consumed by external processes, and are ignored by MapRoulette.

When attaching blobs, use of --format is recommended, and if the data isn't JSON-compatible (i.e. XML or binary data), then --encode must be specified or you'll end up with malformed GeoJSON.

Here is an example command that attaches arbitrary XML data as a blob. Note that --format xml has been specified and --encode has also been provided.

mr attach task --in my_challenge.geojson --out updated_challenge.geojson --kind blob --format xml --encode --file-pattern 'attachment_{osmid}.xml'

Using your own generated attachments as-is

Normally the mr-cli tool takes your raw attachment files and builds all of the proper task attachment JSON required by MapRoulette, as documented. But if you've generated your own complete attachment JSON files conforming to the documentation, you can ask mr-cli to simply use your files as-is by using the --as-is option. The only augmentation mr-cli may perform is to generate id fields for your attachments if missing.

mr attach task --in my_challenge.geojson --out updated_challenge.geojson --as-is --file-pattern 'attachment_{osmid}.json'

Mixing multiple kinds of attachments

mr-cli only allows one kind of attachment (such as blobs or reference layers) in a single run, but you can add additional kinds of attachments with additional runs on the output. The additional matching attachments will be added to tasks as needed, leaving earlier attachments intact.

It's even possible to pipe multiple mr-cli runs together using the standard input and standard output. For example, the following attaches blobs followed by reference layers. Note that the first command does not include an --out, thereby sending its results to the standard output, and the second command omits the --in so that it reads from the standard input:

mr attach task --in my_challenge.geojson --kind blob --format xml --encode --file-pattern 'blobs_{osmid}.xml' | mr attach task --out updated_challenge.geojson --kind referenceLayer --auto-detect --file-pattern 'layers_{osmid}.gpx'

Additional Notes

• Generated challenge files use a line-by-line format that is well suited to streaming, whereby each line in the file contains a complete GeoJSON object representing a single task in the challenge. It may not be possible to open or manipulate this file using traditional GeoJSON tools

• As of v0.1.2, RFC 7464 compliant line-by-line GeoJSON is generated by default. If you must upload your challenge to a MapRoulette instance earlier than v3.6.5, you can specify --no-rfc7464 to generate the old format.

• This utility has not been tested on Windows

Development

1. Clone the repo
2. npm install to install NPM packages

Run with npm run mr -- <command>. If you're writing to the standard output, use npm --silent run mr so that the generated GeoJSON isn't polluted with status messages from NPM.