[OSM-dev] GSoC - Data Tile Service

[Michael Daines]

Hi everyone,

My name is Michael Daines, and for this year's GSoC I proposed to create a service to provide fast, up-to-date map data accessible by tile. Some example uses are client-side rendering, editors, and client-side interactivity. My plan is for the project to be available as both a publicly-accessible service and as an application that's easy to set up and customize for yourself (even on a small home server).

The wiki page for my project is here:

  http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code/2012/Data_Tile_Service

I'm looking for feedback about a couple things, so if this seems like it might be helpful for a project you're working on or want to work on, I'd like to hear from you about what I've written about so far on the wiki page.

- How would you use a data tile service? I've added some notes about the requirements for a few use cases so far on the wiki page, but I'm hoping to collect more ideas.
- What do you think about the tile format?
- What do you think about the "customizations" for data tiles that I've mentioned on the wiki? These are mainly optimizations to reduce the size of tiles, particularly at lower zoom levels.
- Would you like to set up a data tile service on your own server? Since this is an important part of the project, I'm interested in finding testers.

Another issue is what kind of tile sets will be made publicly available as part of this project. I imagine the answer will become clearer as the project progresses, but one possibility is a tile set with complete data at a single high zoom level. A smaller goal my timeline mentions as a milestone is making available a tile set with a single zoom level which includes all data for a particular geographical area (possibly the SF bay area).


Thanks!