[OSM-dev] openstreetmap could start at user's approximate location using geo-ip

[Sam Watkins]

On Sun, Jan 18, 2009 at 03:34:14PM +0000, Tom Hughes wrote:
> It uses the cookie first, then your home location (assuming you're 
> logged in), then GeoIP via hostip.info, and finally defaults to Europe.
> Take a look at www.hostip.info if you want to see where it thinks you 
> are.

hi Tom, everyone

(I accidentally posted this to Tom off list yesterday.)

hostip.info says I am located in "500 Internal Server Error"!

I don't like this present technique because it's slow, and it's not
working for me and several others on the list. Geo::IPFree exists and
unlike hostip.info works correctly for me. I propose we change the
system to use such a local free IP->country database. I can also provide
a country border database we could center it on the center of the
rectangular bounding box.  Not sure 

I can have a go at making this change if that's agreeable.

I was working a while ago on a project with the same idea as
openstreetmap.org - but I didn't get very far with it.  I did write code
that can animate flying around or zooming in on the planet, it included
country borders and cities only.  I would like to change that program so
it can use the openstreetmap data, that would be fun.

My program also includes a method of dividing the earth's surface into a
hierarchy of approximately equal-sized "rectangular" regions (so it
wouldn't have lots of very skinny regions near the poles).  I'm not sure
what method openstreetmap uses for this.

One other thing I would like to see is rotation of the map (my program
can do that), this is fun and potentially useful, but it would need a
vector based renderer.  Is there a browser-compatible vector-based
renderer, or is anyone working on that?  I suppose that would give
vastly better performance than the tiled image system.

One of my friends had an idea to include information about the areas /
places or local current events or just their daily lives like a blog (or
business locations etc linked to web sites), edited by people living at
those places.  I'm not sure if openstreetmap does or would like to do
anything like that.

It would also obviously be really cool to make something like Neil
Stephenson's "the street" a 3d environment with avatars, but based on
the real world map!  maybe could call it virtual tourist, could walk
around in the world and meet people who are online and live in that
place.  Open street map together with geographical data and the public
wiki model make that very possible to achieve.  I don't know if this is
a goal for openstreetmap already.

I tried zooming the map "way out" it's funny how it says "more open
streep map coming soon" in the area above the north and south poles!!!

Sam