[Imports] EEA:Nationally designated areas import

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 07/30/2012 12:16 PM, Jaak Laineste wrote:
> Technical proposal: what about setting up a shared GIS server
> somewhere next to Mapnik renderer, so it would provide both usable
> CMS and hosting for this kind of datasets? So community can upload
> their shapefiles with metadata there, Mapnik can use them and other
> community renderers can download and use them too if they need to.
> Technically there are already some shapefile-based datasets in mapnik
> renderer (coastlines hosted in SVN); what is missing is a scalable
> interface to add other external datasets.

There are a number of organisations attempting the same already. For 
example, the "WeoGeo marketplace" hosts many free shapefiles, and so 
does a github repository run by Development Seed/Mapbox (who want to 
make it easy for TileMill users to access shapefiles). Even ESRI is in 
that game.

> There are several opensource GIS server packages which could be good
> fit, Geoserver seems to be closest to me. Sure, it has a lot of GIS
> stuff we don't really need right away, and may miss some features,
> but it seems to have good base to get started with it.

But don't kid yourself - the amount of free datasets around is huge and 
will easily use up any capacity we can build up. I would of course much 
prefer such a solution to everybody dumping their stuff into OSM because 
then it is easier to access (many people behind imports to OSM don't 
even want to bother setting up their own renderer - they believe that 
once stuff is in OSM, we'll conventiently render it for them). But even 
this approach has its limits, and we're likely to reach them quickly. 
The basic question remains the same: Is it part of our mission to 
collect and re-distribute free data that we're not the owner of?

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"