Hi to all,
As @seewhy, we are facing similar needs that are difficult to solve with ODK only for the moment, in the context of long/middle term monitoring of a lot of objects (hedges, ponds, habitat patches, hydraulic gates or valves, grapes parcels, sample plots and so on).
I think this discussion is linked to enhancements you are discussing for entity based data collection (eg choose on a map the object I want to describe).
The first use case I have in mind is about square cells monitoring on the field. The study zone is divided in square cells from 10 to 100 meters large (depending on the effort it represents) and we populate several indicators for each cell. To achieve that in ODK I use a Geopoint question with a base layer and an overlay of sample cells to be as sure as possible I am in the good one (relative to the one I feed before).
the survey logical is :
- date
- site
- cell (repeat-group)
- question 1,
- indicator 2
- indicator 3
- ...
- cell (repeat-group)
- comment about the session
Once data arrives in our database, a spatial intersection associates each data to the cell containing the geopoint.
As a database manager this is OK for me as the data are well associated to the right space but the user experience is not so good as colleagues can't see on the map which cells were already feed during the session. They do it with a second app, running in parallel to ODK and showing their trace on the map (oruxmaps). In the same time they eared about QGIS derivatives that should do the job but I am afraid about data consolidation with such tools.
The second use case is about water level hydraulic management equipment monitoring. Because every equipment is not named in a meaningful way and because they are a lot, we perform a cascading select one to reduce the choice list. After the user selected the one he think he is standing in front of, I show / display? a map (as a note) with the location of the selected element and the location of the user, so he can confirm or correct his choice.
For those cases I imagine, (dream about 
) two geo improvements in ODK :
- be able to click a vector object on a map to fill a form about (it seems to be part of the EDBC discussions and use cases)
- having a new "select_one_from_layer" widget, which, as the select_one could be feed by the choices sheet or by an external dataset, and contain, an id, a name and a geojson or other geo-standart column to draw it on the map. Already selected entries should be styled in a different way than the others in order to see the progression on the field.