[OSM-dev] GSoc Idea Statics Map API

[John McKerrell]

On 24 Mar 2009, at 14:14, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

> 2009/3/24 amit sethi <amit.pureenergy at gmail.com>:
>>
>> I am a student interested in applying to Gsoc idea : Developing a  
>> statics
>> map API for openstreetmap like the one for Google map.
>> The major work involved :
>> Can openstreetmap data be converted to GIS / GDAL
>> Real Time conversion of openstreetdata to image files ( MapniK is  
>> one of the
>> tools that can do this . Can it be used for OSM data.)
>> If openstreetmap data can be converted to GIS why not deliver it  
>> through
>> GeoDjango
>
> FWIW it looks like this would be very useful for deployment on
> Wikimedia (discussed on dev@ and talk@ recently). To embed static map
> images in articles.

A much simpler way of implementing something like this, though, is to  
just stitch together the existing tiles, like Patrick mentions. That  
way you don't have to do intensive rendering, you simply load in 4 (or  
more) existing images and stitch them together. You can still then  
overlay markers and do stuff like that, you wouldn't be able to do  
custom styles but that doesn't seem to be part of the requirement.  
This method saves you having to worry about different styles of map in  
the static API, so you wouldn't have to keep config files up to date  
or anything like that, but also allows you to serve any tiles through  
the same method.

FYI, that's how Multimap's API works, don't know about Google but I  
imagine it's similar.

John