[OSM-talk] OpenLayers May Dump in Ka-Map/OpenLayers

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Sun, Jul 02, 2006 at 01:03:29PM -0400, Christopher Schmidt wrote:
> http://london.freemap.in/may.html
> 
>  * Blue Marble Next Generation/Global Mosaic data, precached through zoom
>    level 8
>  * OpenStreetMap May data dump, *segments only*, using a very simple
>    rendering of Highway tags and name tags. 
>  * Ability to click on/near a segment, and see information about that 
>    segment or segments in the sidebar -- including a direct link to the 
>    OSM API. 
> 
> Data for OSM is served off the Freemap server, data for Satellite is
> served off the OpenLayers.org server. Caches are built on the fly, so
> the first time you click through to an area, you will see significant
> lag in rendering, but this will go away after this first render.
> 
> Known issues:
>  * Rendering does not include 'class' tags, so some segments which are
>    tagged do not show up as such.
>  * Rendering does not include ways, nor does search. 
>  * 'lanes' tag seems to be showing up more than it should.
>  * Clicking when zoomed out will oftentimes produce the maximum number
>    of results (20) and still not include the one you want
>      ... and in general, it's difficult to find the segment you want.
>  * No editing interface.
> 
> The last one is a social decision -- I don't want to provide an editing
> interface until I can provide a copy of the map with up to date data,
> because otherwise people will just complain about the lack of data, and
> I don't want to hear it :)

After putting in an afternoon of work on it, I changed my mind. Editing
is now available on *segments only*. Additionally, I've processed the
linear ways out of the planet.osm file from May, and those are now
displayed (as a seperate layer, also queryable) on the map.

The biggest reason for not creating the editing interface for the ways
as well is simply one based on the difficulty of performing a data merge
of existing data with new data. Is there an easy way to modify only tags
of a way in the API? I didn't see one, but maybe I missed something --
it seems like it would make sense to just edit tags, and not have to
send a full list of segments with every revision...

I'll probably implement way editing tomorrow, but was wondering if there
were any tips and tricks on how to contruct the XML from an existing
way.

There was a long discussion on #osm of whether tagging segments is
useful at all. I maintain that it's easier for someone like me, who
doesn't know London, to come along and group segments tagged by name
into a way than it is without that data. This also leads the way towards
making OSM more of a wikipedia-style project: The barrier to entry has
just been (in my opinion) lowered significantly. If you see a segment
that you live on, you can click on it (with the 'segments' checked in
the dropdown), type in two fields ('name', "My Street St.") and you've
updated the OSM dataset. 

Try doing that with the applet, and I bet you'll find it takes a lot
longer, and a lot more experience to get there.

This can't be the *only* editing interface for OSM obviously -- there's
no drawing, for one, and that's a biggy.  But right now there are
hundreds of thousands of untagged segments. Getting more than a few
elite users to edit this data would be a useful step forward, I think.

Socially, lowering the bar to entry may mean that more people then make
the effort to leap the higher bars of JOSM, Applet, etc. editing. I'm
excited to see more people participating in entering data in the
project, and I really think this has the potential to do that.

The rendered data is based off Planet.osm. If someone can give me an
updated dataset (built from josm downloads or something) for the whole
world, I can drop it into place -- however, I don't want to have to do a
merge by hand, since I can't figure out how I'd do it ;) (I've been
asked how to get updated data in there several times already, which is
why I mention it.)

-- 
Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer