[Talk-us] TopOSM

[Lars Ahlzen]

Hi Kevin,

On 05/22/2016 11:26 PM, Kevin Kenny wrote:
> Alas, I'm not going to SOTM, but put me down as someone who's 
> interested in the project, with some 'skin in the game' already.
>
> As I already posted privately to Clifford:
>
> I picked up TopOSM's code for my own purposes and added quite a few 
> twists of my own. I use the result as a basemap for several of my own 
> projects. You can see what it looks like at 
> https://kbk.is-a-geek.net/catskills/test3.html.

You've done some great work on the topo maps! I've been following it for 
quite some time. It would fantastic if you're interested in closer 
collaboration.

> Clearly, I am NOT tooled up to serve it up on a large scale.
>
> It depends on a good many publicly-available data layers with 
> ODBL-incompatible terms. Life is full of tradeoffs. I think that a 
> 'sanitized' version with only ODBL and US Government data wouldn't be 
> too difficult to put together.
>
> I'm more than willing to share the code, but it would be a bit of a 
> nightmare to set up. I think that the best approach would be to share 
> it with a willing apprentice (if you will) in pieces, reworking as we 
> go to make sure that each shared piece runs for more than just me and 
> the setup is better documented than it is now. I'm willing to put in 
> the effort to make such a project succeed, but would find it immensely 
> difficult without a guinea pig to try stuff out and provide ongoing 
> feedback.

Sounds like a good plan. I guess we should take further details off 
list, but I think this is well worth giving a try.

> Significant public layers that I include that I believe TopOSM does 
> not include:
>
> (1) NLCD [...]
>
> (2) A fair number of FCODES from NHD [...]
>
> (3) The USFWS National Wetlands Inventory. [...]

I did (1) and (2) in TopOSM2 (and some related projects I've been 
working on since) but, of course, that was never finished so I guess 
that's moot. Either way, it's probably good that we've been heading in 
the same direction.

- Lars