[Talk-GB] Customised Maps (was OSM Analysis New Data and bot)

Adam Hoyle adam.lists at dotankstudios.com
Wed Jun 15 14:22:36 BST 2011


Hi Graham,

Sorry, I got a bit over excited and subscribed to tons of OSM mailing lists and so totally missed your awesome reply :-(

Sorry if I wasn't clear - I've successfully got Mapnik installed (did it a week or three ago and it was pretty painless as far as I recall), so am particularly after a sample config file to start from, particularly one with hill contours / gradients / whatever-they-are-really-called-outside-the-confines-of-my-head.

Altho' having said that the package that Parveen Arora is putting together looks pretty awesome, so maybe I should hold out for that, even tho' it looks more targeted for Debian than OS X - I guess if push comes to shove I could install Debian in VMware, which I already have on my laptop.

By the way townguide looks rather amazing, so adding that to my (rather long) list of things to check out :-)

Thanks for the offer of helping generate the configuration file, not sure of the best way to do that tho' as I want something I can start with and hack around with and iterate a lot until it's "right". The primary thing I want is pubs and post boxes available when zoomed out (ideally the same zoom range as footpaths show up on), and if possible the mountain gradients/contours - I've seen a couple of maps "in the wild" that use these, but not sure how possible/straightforward it is for a Mapnik newbie such as myself.

Cheers,

Adam

On 10 Jun 2011, at 10:46, Graham Jones wrote:

> Adam (changed the title of the thread to keep this one separate),
> The simplest way to do it is to make overlays that are transparent and you can view over another set of tiles.   
> I have done a few before now - there is one visible at http://maps3.org.uk, which highlights historic things over the normal mapnik rendering.
> I still have the idea to set up something to make the learning curve easier, because I appreciate that setting up mapnik and all its dependencies is quite daunting - there is something on my osm user page about it (grahamjones).
> 
> If you want to do it yourself, there are a few different sets of instructions - the osm wiki 'mapnik' page is a good start.  Note that linux is much easier than Windows (or at least there are better instructions!).
> 
> I have a set of instructions that work for me at http://code.google.com/p/townguide/wiki/InstallationInstructions.   (there may be a minor issue with postgresql authentication that I need to fix).
> 
> Parveen Aurora is currently working on making a simple package that will install and configure everything for you for his Google Summer of Code project, but you will have to give him a few weeks to get something ready for testing (https://github.com/ParveenArora/MeraMap).
> 
> If you would like to work out what you would like to render (ie which tag combinations), how you would like them drawn (line colour and width, icon image etc.), I can help you turn that into a mapnik configuration file and generate the map for you on my computer.    I think it is better to spend time thinking about the rendering than having to worry about database configuration nuts and bolts.
> 
> Regards
> 
> 
> Graham.
> 
> Regards
> 
> 
> Graham.
> 
> On 10 June 2011 10:27, Adam Hoyle <adam.lists at dotankstudios.com> wrote:
> Sorry in advance - after writing this I've realised I'm possibly heading off on a tangent (I do that).
> 
> Speaking of the awesomeness of Cycle Map and how that encourages people - I really want an openwalkingtothepubmap, which would basically be a clone of the gorgeous cycle map, but with the coloured cycle routes removed in favour of coloured paths and also pubs visible when quite zoomed out (and prolly post boxes too, but that is probably particularly niche).
> 
> I'm starting to realise that I might need to roll up my sleeves and do this myself.
> 
> Every now and then I try to install Mapnik on my Mac, and mostly fail, but I tried t'other day and it worked, so I'm wondering where the various styles that are used on OSM are kept (or even if they are actually available for derivative use) - I'm most keen on cyclemap or something that has gradients, cos as a walker I'm quite interested in whether I am about to walk over a massive hill or not.
> 
> Can anyone point me in the right direction?
> 
> All the best,
> 
> Adam
> 
> On 10 Jun 2011, at 09:35, Bob Kerr wrote:
> 
>> I agree with Andy about increasing the number of mappers is essential. With Cycle map he has increased the interest in the cycling communities. Getting interest and publicity is very difficult. I can see many other communities that we could encourage to start helping us, from NHS to golfers but we have no organised way of doing this at the moment. Using a bot to replace large sections of data in the UK is going to be counterproductive or destructive, especially as the UK is now 80% (road name)complete.  However restricting a bot by area to the size of small villages may help. I believe we can both encourage people to join us and use the a bot on small areas at the same time.
>> 
>> Cheers
>> 
>> bob
>> 
>> 
>> From: Andy Allan <gravitystorm at gmail.com>
>> To: SK53_osm at yahoo.co.uk
>> Cc: talk-gb at openstreetmap.org
>> Sent: Thursday, 9 June 2011, 16:45
>> Subject: Re: [Talk-GB] OSM Analysis New Data and bot
>> 
>> On Thu, Jun 9, 2011 at 3:42 PM, Jerry Clough : SK53 on OSM
>> <SK53_osm at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>> 
>> > In order to get  a better level of completeness in the UK what we need are
>> > more mappers.
>> 
>> Absolutely.
>> 
>> Everything we do should be focussed on helping get more mappers, or
>> helping the mappers we have get their jobs done more easily.
>> Everything that is a direct substitute for having more mappers is, at
>> best, a distraction from (what I see as) the desired goal. If we have
>> mappers, and lots of them, then - as we've now demonstrated - we can
>> get a glorious dataset.
>> 
>> Note that not everyone here shares the same goals - some people are
>> focussed on the data, others on the community. It might be worth
>> examining why we (collectively) have a tendency to discuss the data
>> all the time and I see very few discussions on community matters.
>> 
>> I find in most conversations, if the answer is "because we don't have
>> enough mappers yet" then the solution is not to bypass them with some
>> form of automation but to get more of them. Unfortunately to most
>> OSMers, community building seems hard (which it is), and writing bots
>> or doing imports seems easy (which it's not).
>> 
>> > A bot is putting short-term gain ahead of our long-term interests.
>> 
>> Indeed. What's more, all the effort that goes into writing bots,
>> discussing them, justifying them etc is time that hasn't gone into the
>> primary goal of recruiting and helping more people to OSM.
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> Andy
>> 
>> 
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> 
> -- 
> Graham Jones
> Hartlepool, UK.
> 

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