[OSM-talk] The long tail

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Thu, Jul 06, 2006 at 01:27:28PM +0100, Nick Whitelegg wrote:
> 
> Good points Steve. I agree privacy is a concern - it's not for me personally 
> (I'm sure it's of no consequence to anyone else to know that I regularly go 
> walking in the Hampshire countryside at the weekends and was on Ben Nevis on 
> June 25th at about four in the afternoon) but I'm sure that for others it 
> could be. Actually if anything the timestamps could justify my walking 
> randomly round roads in Southampton if some over zealous neighbourhood watch 
> people got a bit funny... :-)
> 
> > In any case, hopefully after Saturday we'll have daily planet.osm dumps
> > (with that naming convention someone specced out) which I should have
> > worked harder to produce in the past. Then, we can integrate the cool
> > openlayers stuff crschmidt's done in to the front page and get away from
> > the flaky tiles we're serving, if NickW doesn't mind too much that we'd
> > be dropping his work.
> 
> Well, I *did* put a fair amount of work into it.... :-) <g>
> 
> Seriously, though, whatever's best for the project basically. Presumably 
> Chris's stuff will be checked into subversion, so that others can work on it 
> if need be?

Absolutely, but note that most of the work in rendering is done by
mapserver. The documentation on mapserver rendering is pretty good, so
anyone should be able to with an hour or two figure out how to help make
the map prettier, and all of the code for generating the data against
which the data is rendered is already available (In the wiki). the
tiling engine is ka-Map. 

Essentially, this is moving towards OSM not being a project which has to
work on new rendering technology, but instead a project which uses
existing geographic tools to do so, combined with the use of OSM's API
to create an editing interface. This allows OSM to concentrate where its
efforts are needed most -- collecting data.

> In any case, daily planet dumps will allow me to work on my own 
> countryside-orientated Freemap (as in free-map.org.uk, not freemap.in... 
> maybe time for a name change to avoid confusion...) renderer and keep it up 
> to date.

Yeah, I realize that the freemap.* domain name confuses people, but it's
the easiest place to use a CVS version of mapserver. :)

-- 
Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer