[Talk-GB] 'Easy' Speciality Map Rendering

[Tom Chance]

Graham,


One thing you could usefully document – an in an easy-to-read, visual,
engaging way rather than dense jargon-filled wiki pages – and publicise is
how to use built-in support in OpenLayers. For example, it’s not all that
hard to download some interesting data via XAPI (if it were a bit more
reliable) and display it as a layer in an OpenLayers. A little bit of code
can also provide a popup bubble containing the tags associated with the
feature.



This is a good deal easier than rendering a new set of map tiles.



Here are a couple of examples:

http://tomchance.dev.openstreetmap.org/trees.html

http://tomchance.dev.openstreetmap.org/emptyshops.html


If the data set isn't too large, this would work fine for maps of canals and
locks as well.


You can use CloudMade's style editor to create a suitable set of map tiles,
too, if the default OpenStreetMap/OpenCycleMap/etc. tiles don't suit your
needs.



Tom


On 22 February 2011 13:03, Graham Jones <grahamjones139 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Andy,
> I will certainly have a look at that, thank you - I have not seen that
> service.
>
> I am hoping to make this more than just a hosting service though.  This has
> been reinforced by a couple of off-list converstations I have had where
> there is a good chunk of making it easy for people to develop their own
> styles (without the overhead of setting up a rendering tool-chain), and most
> importantly providing straightforward documentation on how to do it.
>
> Maybe I should think a bit more about documentation first rather than
> concentrating so much on code!
>
> Graham.
>
> On 22 February 2011 10:19, Andy Allan <gravitystorm at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 7:38 PM, Graham Jones <grahamjones139 at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> > I have put some thoughts on what this system would look like on my OSM
>> user
>> > page (
>> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:Grahamjones#Speciality_Maps).
>> > My question is whether many people would find this useful?   Or has
>> someone
>> > already done it but I have not found it?
>>
>> The guys over at wikimedia do this with their toolserver (amongst
>> other things) - producing both custom background layers and custom
>> overlays. For example,
>>
>>
>> http://toolserver.org/~osm/styles/?lat=52.49436&lon=13.28916&zoom=12&layers=0000F0FT0000F0FFFB000T
>>
>> ... is a black and white mapnik, with hillshading and power
>> distribution overlays. Documentation is a bit sparse but there's some
>> at
>>
>> https://wiki.toolserver.org/view/OpenStreetMap
>>
>> Anyone can develop a map style and ask to get it rendered. As part of
>> the toolserver project many of the tools needed for this kind of thing
>> were developed / used - e.g. hstore in osm2pgsql. You should certainly
>> dig into what they are doing, what kind of hardware they are using and
>> so on.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Andy
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Graham Jones
> Hartlepool, UK.
>
>
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>


-- 
http://tom.acrewoods.net   http://twitter.com/tom_chance
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