[OSM-dev] Customizing map for wikivoyage.org

[Hans Musil]

I'm one of the technical admins on wikivoyage.org. Wikivoyage is a 
non-profit open-content project with the goal to produce a world wide 
travel guide. So far, only in German and Italian. We still have a lack 
of suitable maps.

Let me describe my ideas in short:
* We plan to keep a copy of OSM's database on our server.
* We would like to render customized static maps for different purposes 
form this database.
* We need projections different from Mercator for large scale overview maps.
* When redering, depending on the purpose, we need to focus for certain 
map features.
* Maps should be generated automatically without any human help.

All this looks like a complex project, so I probably will ask you for 
some help during the next weeks and months.

Here are my first questions, also posted to 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Osmosis#What_Java_distributions_will_work.3F

Is there any benefit from using PostGIS instead of PostgreSQL without 
PostGIS? I do ask this because I have experienced several oddities when 
experimenting with PostGIS before.

As far a I see, getting osmosis running is vital for importing the 
planet.osm file into the database. I freely admit that java is not my 
favourit language. We run Debian Lenny on our server and there is a 
confusing choice of Java distros: openJDK, gcj or sun-jdk. Could you 
give me a hint which of them would be the best to install?

Thanks for all help

Hans (User Hansm on Wikivoyage)