[OSM-talk] Freemap in Mercator

Christopher Schmidt crschmidt at crschmidt.net
Sat Jul 8 13:56:16 BST 2006


On Sat, Jul 08, 2006 at 10:17:41AM +0100, Nick Whitelegg wrote:
> 
> > 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 ).
> 
> Moving onto the context of my own free-map.org.uk renderer of the OSM data:
> Can mapserver still help to reduce the complexity of the rendering code if you 
> wanted to avoid the gml/shapefile stage? Maybe it's slightly irrational but I 
> find it somewhat more elegant to be able to render the database data direct. 
> However, if mapserver can ease the complexity of scripting required to do the 
> rendering, and it isn't too hard to setup, I would consider it in my own 
> project.

It's possible that in some way it may be possible to connect directly to
the OSM database format for gathering the data. I think this would
especially be true if it were possible to create a 'view' of the data
which as geographic in nature - that is, that segments had geographic
extents, rather than the ID of the nodes they're attached to.

However, I have never worked with Mapserver's SQL methods. The closest
I've come is rendering against a PostGIS database -- which is much
easier. Would this help you? Is it being able to store the data in a
database that your'e concerned about, or the exact setup of the OSM
database (Which is not at all designed for map drawing: topological,
rather than geographic, formats are not the ideal way for storing data
for mapmaking)?

-- 
Christopher Schmidt
Web Developer




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