[Talk-GB] Elections Online website - candidate for OSM?

Andy Townsend ajt1047 at gmail.com
Tue Dec 3 19:40:48 UTC 2019


On 03/12/2019 09:47, Edward Bainton wrote:
> Hi all
>
> General Elections Online 
> <https://electionresults.parliament.uk/#Cities%20of%20London%20and%20Westminster> (hosted 
> at parliament.uk <http://parliament.uk>) have got a failed page where 
> the Google map is overlaid with "Development purposes only".
>
> I was planning to suggest they use OSM instead.
>
> Can anyone point me to the precise technical detail their webmaster 
> will need? Is it the wiki page, Deploying your own Slippy Map 
> <https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Deploying_your_own_Slippy_Map>?
>
It depends very much on what they want to do.

At the highest level, they have a choice of two options - they can pay 
someone else to provide a service to them or they can create something 
themselves without using a third party.

IF someone else is providing a service the amount work that they need to 
do could be anything from nothing (like a new kitchen planned and 
installed for you for lots of £) to quite a lot (order some units from 
B&Q and assemble it yourself).

Andy's already mentioned https://switch2osm.org/ - that has an 
(incomplete) providers list at https://switch2osm.org/providers/ .  Many 
of the organisations there will be able to help and will be able to help 
them and may offer different products for different levels of involvement.

There's also the "completely do it yourself" option, which is actually 
somewhat easier than the kitchen analogue of a pile of timber from 
Jewson's.  One option that would achieve this would need:

  * Some map tiles underneath (which don't need to be hugely detailed)
  * A way of displaying constituency boundaries on top
  * A way of handling "user clicks on constituency A, display details"

The hard part might actually be making the whole lot robust enough to 
cope with demand over the next couple of weeks.  What wouldn't be a good 
idea would be using an existing set of free-at-the-point-of-use map 
tiles (such as the ones at OpenStreetMap.org) and expecting them to 
"just cope" with the volume - see 
https://twitter.com/OSM_Tech/status/1122495446465810438 for what 
happened when the London Marathon did that (for completeness the 
relevant policy is at 
https://operations.osmfoundation.org/policies/tiles/ ).

If they did want to "completely do it themselves" then 
https://switch2osm.org/serving-tiles/manually-building-a-tile-server-18-04-lts/ 
will get them some raster map tiles, and 
https://switch2osm.org/using-tiles/ and the examples at (to pick just 
one example) https://leafletjs.com/ will allow them to create overlays 
over those, and allow people to click through for particular information.

With regards to the "hard part" they can restrict the map zoom to 
something that is not too high (enough so that constituencies are 
visible and clickable should be good enough) prerender tiles and cache 
them, but I'm sure they must have lots of familiarity with this sort of 
problem given that they already run a public and intermittently very 
busy website.

Best Regards,

Andy


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