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

[Jonathan-David SCHRODER]

On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 4:10 AM, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason
<avarab at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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.
>
Hello,
I do accept to have some buildings' outer bounds to be stored on the
database which is _public_, but I and people who'll use our project will -
we guess - mostly not want to have their building's levels contents
(chair,table,fridge,room 322,trashcan...) stored inside that database, but
rather another private database.
I already use JOSM to send the buildings outer bounds on the public server
and this process/the tool is ok enough, I don't need to speak about APIs for
public stuff for now.
Though for private stuff = the buildings contents, I'll very likely use the
APIs and private to me means :
- private dedicated server deployed by my team
or
- private openstreetmap space on some service provider's cloud

>
> 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.

ok thank you, more than generate_tile.py, likely the server side API scripts
should be checked so that they don't round/skip a request if its lat&long
are too precise.

so if I understand well, in this case in the global setup I'd have :
openstreetmap.org for storing building's outdoor bounds and also sending
frequent updates of my buildings' surrounding areas' data
myownstreetmapserver.org for storing the latter surrounding areas' data +
merging that with my building's indoor data & rendering the whole into
outdoor & fine-grained indoor tiles with custom icons (stylesheet) ?

>
> 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?
>
Ok... well, at least for now, I can tell that I can draw things <1m in JOSM
and see those items represented on openstreetmap.org in the same precision
in the Edit tab (potlactch?) ; in the View tab, I can't tell because I can't
zoom more.

For our mobile use, for now, we don't plan to use openlayers
(browser-hosted)  for speed considerations, but some java-based
apps/libraries. While it seems obvious that we'll stay with openlayers
(viewing) and JOSM/* (editing) for desktop computers.

Thank you very much for having replied.
Jonathan
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/dev/attachments/20091130/d7af33ef/attachment.html>