[OSM-talk] Freemap in Mercator

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Sat, Jul 08, 2006 at 12:26:42AM +0100, Nick Whitelegg wrote:
> 
> > Hopefully, this will allow more involvement in controlling the way the
> > rendering looks, less need to write complex rendering code, and more
> > support for standards, as Mapserver is able to act as a WMS or WFS
> > server, serving up the data in any format from gif to png to flash to
> > SVG.
> 
> Chris,
> 
> Just out of interest how do you get Mapserver to read the OSM XML format 
> and/or the OSM database? There must be some 'middle bit' - presumably a 
> script of some sort - which performs the following task:

Yep. http://london.freemap.in/osm2gml_simple.py.txt does this conversion
to GML, from which I use ogr2ogr july.planet.shp july.planet.gml , to
get shapefiles, which are what the data is rendered against. (This is
linked from the Wikipage at
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Converting_OSM_to_GML ).

> > I hope that the new era of rendering will make things easier for people,
> > as well as making the maps more attractive (as people contribute) and
> > informative for people who are new to the project. And if I'm wrong,
> > hell, it's in SVN: We can always go back to the old way of doing things.
> 
> Now it looks like we'll have a daily planet, I guess there's plenty of room 
> for alternative renderers of the data too, to suit individuals' needs.

Agreed.

-- 
Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer