[OSM-dev] Shaded relief in OSM

[Jon Burgess]

On Wed, 2007-12-05 at 15:21 +0000, Tom Hughes wrote:
> In message <D4A3B7AB-5192-4678-A997-9E3EC0060546 at gmail.com>
>         Artem Pavlenko <artem.mapnik at googlemail.com> wrote:
> 
> > Jon Burgess pointed me to : http://www.shadedrelief.com/ and I  
> > downloaded some data, warped into Mercator and rendered tiles with  
> > Mapnik.
> > Here are results : http://mapnik.org/maps/natural_earth/
> > This is a very rough cut and I'm aware of some problems ..
> >
> > Should we be using this data (public domain AFAIK)  for mapnik layer  
> > or on separate layer ? What do cartographers think?
> 
> I would think the obvious thing to do is to change our current
> layers to have a transparent background, then we can get OL to
> render them over other things if we want - be that relief tiles
> like this or OAM imagery or whatever.
> 

Originally I was thinking that we could use these relief tiles for zoom
0 - 4 which currently display only boring vmap0 derived data. These
relief tiles are based on fairly low resolution data so we could
probably only use them at a maximum of zoom 6 anyway. 

It should be easy to slot in an alternate set of tiles for 0-4 with an
Apache URL rewrite rule on tile without changing anything else.

I think we first need to see transparent tiles working as an alternate
layer for a while before we considered changing the main site. It would
also take a long time to re-render all the existing tiles. 

	Jon