[OSM-dev] OSM Photos

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

> Of course the perfect solution would be that all geotagged photos, wherever
> taken in the world and of whatever subject you can think of, are all
> accessible, searchable and filterable and overlain as a layer over an OSM
> map. That would be really cool and could grow into quite some site. But I
> don't think it should be a core activity for OSM itself. In my opinion it
> really needs to be a separate project.

I have thought about "third party OSM" servers in other contexts too. 
For example, the idea has often been floated that it would be nice to 
have meta data which is aimed only at mappers and editors, like "this 
area should be fairly complete", "this road did continue but I didn't 
follow it", or "this area has fierce private security guys who will be 
unhappy about people with GPSes" and so on.

Something like that could easily be put an a different server that is 
better suited for handling such data (the OSM server cannot handle areas 
properly, i.e. if someone draws a rectangle over a whole city and puts 
an annotation in regarding that city, no OSM user who downloads a 
bounding box *within* that city will see that because the data just 
isn't returned).

One would have a JOSM plugin that, when downloading an area for editing 
from the OSM server, would also query that third-party server for any 
meta information regarding that area, and when entering 
meta-information, would upload it to that server.

I am not currently working in that direction (first want to see how the 
new API0.4 features impact collaboration), but generally that is a way 
than can be used for situations where OSM is insufficient. It is not 
really a wholly separate project, but it isn't really a part of OSM 
either. (The uniqe login would be solved if OSM goes OpenID or something 
like that.)

I could imagine a similar thing for a photo server.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00.09' E008°23.33'