[OSM-dev] OpenLayers, GeoRSS and annotations demo

[Nick Whitelegg]

Hello everyone,

Following on from all the OpenLayers talk, I have put together a small 
demo of combining OpenLayers with OSM data in the form of a prototype of 
my proposed Freemap-OSM site, which allows walkers and other countryside 
users to annotate OSM-derived maps.

It can be found at 

http://nick.dev.openstreetmap.org/openlayers/

You can turn the OSM (derived from the April planet.osm) and SRTM layers 
on and off using inbuilt OpenLayers controls. What's perhaps equally 
interesting though is a prototype annotation feature. If you select 
'Annotation' mode and then click on the map, a dialog box (actually a 
hidden <div>) appears allowing you to enter details of your map 
annotation. If you click OK the details are then stored in a database 
table designed for holding annotations.

Following on from Mikel's comments I have proposed making the annotations 
available as a GeoRSS feed. Once GeoRSS functionality is available in 
OpenLayers, it will allow previous annotations to be fetched from the 
server and displayed on the map. Note that I got the GeoRSS spec from two 
sources - Mikel's site and the georss.org site so I'm not 100% sure 
whether I've interpreted it correctly.

I have already written a script which dumps (what I believe to be) GeoRSS 
of the annotations in the area. You can try it out with

http://nick.dev.openstreetmap.org/markers.php?bbox=-1,51,0,52

as all the annotations I have made so far are in this bounding box.

Nick