[Talk-ca] Fwd: workflow for elevation data

Richard Weait richard at weait.com
Sun Feb 23 21:41:11 UTC 2014


oops.  Should have gone to the list.


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Richard Weait <richard at weait.com>
Date: Sun, Feb 23, 2014 at 4:40 PM
Subject: Re: [Talk-ca] workflow for elevation data
To: Charles Basenga Kiyanda <personal at charleskiyanda.com>


On Sun, Feb 23, 2014 at 3:42 PM, Charles Basenga Kiyanda
<personal at charleskiyanda.com> wrote:
[ ... ]
> Specific question:
> We don't store elevation data in osm in a standard fashion and I was
> hoping I could show the volunteer organization a tentative alternate
> workflow that would be as little work for them as possible and also give
> them an incentive to keep the osm trail data accurate.

I think that the main issue here is "how do they want to see / use the
elevation data?"

There are several existing styles / tiles that use contours and or
hill shading.  There may also be contours and hill shading that are
available as overly layers for you to add to your own styles.  (If
their aren't, that may be an idea for a value add service. ;-) )

There was a service, run by long time OpenStreetMap user lambertus,
that displayed an elevation profile graph of a selected way.  That
specific source is gone or moved now, but this wiki page shows some of
the similar details from a related summer of code project.

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Route_altitude_profiles_SRTM

It also appears that the routing engine YOURS can interpret elevation
data to apply variable costing when evaluating or planning routes.

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/YOURS

And there are certainly more things that we can do with elevation that
are interesting, depending on the audience.

Is that enough to get you started?

But, yeah.  The elevation data doesn't go into the OSM data base.
Others have used SRTM to inform their OSM objects of elevation matters
and then done interesting this with it.

I gave an Intro to OpenStreetMap talk to some trail folks recently.
It would be great to see them contributing to and benefiting from
OpenStreetMap.



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