[OSM-dev] indoor wifi geopositionning - openstreetmap precision, collaborators?

[Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason]

On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 02:35, Jonathan-David SCHRODER
<jonathan.schroder at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
> I am working on a student project (team of 6 people) whose goal is to build
> a solution allowing mobile devices to display indoor data along with wifi
> geopositioning. (I am willing citing this because contrary to
> http://www.micello.com or http://www.aws.cit.ie/mapume/ who we just found
> about, we want to have something fully open source/free software).
> As part of this project, we have decided to use the openstreetmap server
> software technology.
>
> Someone at University of Calford (UK) did the same as us and managed to draw
> into a self-hosted openstreetmap server, the inside of some campus's
> bookstore.
> See here :
> http://www.ja.net/development/network-access/location-awareness/investigations-la.html
> <= B2. Interactive Maps =
> http://www.ja.net/documents/development/network-access/location-awareness/investigations/B2-interactive-maps-2.pdf
>
> "@page 14 (or 270 in page footers)
> "What worked well was the fact that whilst OpenStreetMap is intended for
> outdoor maps it
> can be made to work equally well for indoor maps. The interactive server can
> be configured to
> provide further zoom levels to display the resolution required for indoor
> maps. The provision of
> interactive elements can then be achieved by editing the PostGIS database to
> include additional
> objects, which can then be rendered by the mapnik renderer. Each additional
> interactive object
> will require its own unique style to be predefined to ensure that they
> appear correctly on the
> portable device."
>
> I have put Nigel Linge who I believe is the author of this PDF and paragraph
> as a recipient of this e-mail too.
>
> Could someone tell precisely what config changes need to be done for indoor
> precision & objects, starting from a regular openstreetmap server setup such
> as that described on
> http://weait.com/content/build-your-own-openstreetmap-server ?
>
> I basically would like to be able to draw every possible object contained in
> a building/home/construction.
> I have started creating a tags draft for indoor which is very limited at :
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features#Proposed_Features_-_Indoor
>
> By the way, who would like to collaborate with my team on our indoor self-
> and objects geopositionning project relying on openstreetmap and java-based
> mobile applications ?

That's a very interesting project, but I don't see why you need to set
up your own OpenStreetMap-like infrastructure for it. Why not just
save this data to the main OpenStreetMap API which will take care of
storing it for you and then retrieve daily dumps for your area and
render the map from those? Then you don't have worry about hosting
your own API, others can easily access your data from OSM and you only
have to worry about rendering.

To render you need small PostGIS database (for mapnik) you refresh
daily along with a custom stylesheet to actually render the data
you're putting in, along with small configuration changes to
mapnik/OpenLayers to render more zoom levels than normally. That can
all be done on something as unpowerful as someones laptop which runs
generate_tiles.py overnight and then uploads tiles / HTML to some web
hosting space.

The only thing I see potentially getting in your way is that the OSM
database doesn't store enough significant digits of lat/lon
coordinates to make indoor mapping viable, but perhaps it does. I
couldn't find documentation on how many digits it stores and how that
translates approximately into real-world meters/centimeters. Perhaps
someone else can chime in with that information?