[Talk-GB] [OSM-talk] Hobbyist OSM Data Server?

Paul Norman penorman at mac.com
Sun Dec 8 10:57:44 UTC 2013


> From: Nick Whitelegg [mailto:Nick.Whitelegg at solent.ac.uk] 
> Sent: Friday, December 06, 2013 4:59 AM
> Subject: [OSM-talk] Hobbyist OSM Data Server?
> 
> So I'm wondering whether we could, if enough people raise contributions, 
> have an OSM "read only, hobbyist" server which could be used to host 
> not-for-profit, open source (only) projects. it could be either global 
> or just for the UK (or any other individual country). It could contain a 
> copy of the OSM PostGIS database then developers could be free to host 
> server side code which delivers that data in whatever format fits their 
> own needs (GeoJSON, some binary vector format, or anything else). 

You should keep in mind the dev server (errol), both for running 
whatever you want to and when planning additional resources if you need 
them. You can find information on the dev server at 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Using_the_dev_server. 

The dev server has an osm2pgsql database, kept up to date every hour and 
imported with hstore and extra attributes (metadata). This is a fairly 
flexible schema, but it's not too widely know that it's running as a 
shared resource. It is suitable for rendering and many types of analysis 
queries, and more flexible than pgsnapshot, apidb or another schema 
closer to the original OSM data. The database is on the RAID5 array of 
7200RPM drives, so it's not exactly fast IO, but it keeps up and isn't 
maxed out. 

The server is of course a shared resource, and suffers from the same 
problem of any shared resource: others badly written code may end up 
impeding your access. Of course what you're proposing can suffer from 
that same problem too. 

The EWG has periodically discussed how the dev server could be more 
useful, and I know reasonable feedback and ideas are welcome, either at 
the meetings on Monday 
(http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Engineering_Working_Group#Meetings) 
or on the dev@ mailing list. 





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