[OSM-dev] OSM clickable POIs - implementation?

[Nick Whitelegg]

On Sunday 06 Jan 2008 14:17, you wrote:
> On Jan 6, 2008 2:19 PM, Nick Whitelegg <nick at hogweed.org> wrote:
> > I would like to try and add clickable POIs to OSM (as already exists on
> > Freemap) so that when you click a village, for example, some info and its
> > Wikipedia link comes up.
> >
> > The best way to do this would seem to be to implement code which takes a
> > lat/lon (or Mercator coord pair) and returns the nearest POI node to it.
> > This could be turned into an API call, as could a similar method to find
> > the nearest way to a mouse click. Do people think this is a good idea?
>
> Any mapnik installation already has all the POIs in a a geospatially
> indexed DB so as a datasource I think that would be best. You could
> always query the api for the full data if you really wanted that.
>
> You could also just display the POIs as icons on the map so users can
> click on them, as in:
> http://dev.openstreetmap.org/~kleptog/pois/pois.html
>

That's possibly the most user friendly way, but my concern with doing it this 
way is you're placing unnecessary load on the server as you're requesting 
POIs every time the user moves the map. What do people think about this?

Nick