Fw: [Openstreetmap] more distributed ideas

[Nick Whitelegg]

>Hi,

>while we are speaking of distributed servers, what about having servers
>for specific types of objects only?

>As example, someone could want to host a server with only tracks with the
>tag "class=river" or "class=coast" and areas with "class=sea",
>"class=ocean" etc... making this server an repository for landscape
>information. Applications that specialize on landscape issues (freemap?)
>could use this server for faster access to these objects.

As developer of Freemap I would like to agree with this idea if it were
feasible. Freemap isn't too interested in the nuances of road travel and
only *really* needs to display certain types of road i.e. primary,
secondary, motorway, country lane and the larger roads in cities. If there
was a countryside-orientated server then it would make Freemap's access to
the data faster.

In a related point, the direction I am moving Freemap towards is a
walking-orientated wiki/AJAX application, where walkers (and other users of
the countryside) can add, edit and delete information such as path
blockages, interesting views, etc, and also add photographs. These would be
accompanied by quite detailed explanations (maybe a paragraph). Again, it
might seem more appropriate to store this info on the
countryside-orientated server rather than the main OSM server.


Nick


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