[Openstreetmap] My plans for a GPS point collector

[Petter Reinholdtsen]

As you might know, I am working on the collector part of this project,
trying to make it easy to contribute.  After considering some options,
I have decided to store the points directly into GPX format on disk.
I considered storing them into an SQL database, and using other
formats, but decided that GPX had most of the features we want.  GPX
is both easy to generate, and several tools already exist to read the
files.

So, the steps planned so far are as follows:

 - Run gpsd to interface with the GPS using serial line, USB or other
   bus, and present the processed information in a standardized format
   over a TCP socket.

 - Run some tool connecting to gpsd (and reconnecting if the
   connection is lost), and writing GPX files to a suitable directory.
   The tool should create new files after a predetermined amount of
   time has passed, or the amount of tracks/points collected reaches a
   limit.  (not sure which).

 - Run another tool taking care of the automatic submission to the
   central collection server.  It should constantly check for network
   connection, and when it detect one (and the GPS report a low or no
   speed), it should submitt the files already collected.

If the machine have a WLAN network card, it would be good to run
kismet or something similar to detect a network, and try to reach the
central collection server whenever a network is found.

My goal is for this system to collect and submit points automatically,
with no need for the user to do anything interactively.  At the
moment, I am working on improving gpsd, and writing a tool to store
the GPX files.  When this is working, I will try to write the
submission tool.  As for the system to connect automatically to
passing WLAN nets, I will leave that to others.

I've also worked on the GPX to ESRI Shape file (gpx2shp) converter,
and and given feedback on the GPX support in qgis.  I still miss some
tool to do the map drawing using the GPS points as a base.  Anyone
getting any progress here?

What are the plans for the central server receiving the GPX files?  I
suspect it should store the points in a PostGIS database.  Do we have
a proposal for a database schema for storing the GPS tracks in
PostGIS?  How much is left to do with the central server?

I suspect a good export format for the maps we make will be GML.
Anyone got a better Idea?  There seem to be tools to export from
PostGIS to GML.  I do not know how good they are.  I'm still looking
for a good GML viewer.  Anyone got a clue?