[OSM-talk] Immediate updates on Freemap and other planet.osm derived sites

[Nick Whitelegg]

This summer I aim to do some serious work on my own Freemap project, aimed 
specificially at countryside mapping for the UK, which has been falling 
behind somewhat recently. To facilitate this, I aim to base Freemap on the 
monthly planet.osm dumps; indeed, if you go to 
http://www.free-map.org.uk/osm/ you can see it uses the PHP version of the 
dev renderer (the Ruby version is too slow on the Bytemark VM which is 
hosting Freemap)

This brings up the question of how more specialised mapping sites which 
use OSM data as a 'base layer' should operate. For Freemap, my aim is to 
make it as easy as possible for users of the UK countryside to upload GPX 
data and construct footpaths, cycle trails, and the like on top of the 
base OSM street data.This would probably involve me writing an online 
editor specialised for Freemap, probably using a JavaScript/AJAX/Canvas 
tag based approach which I tested out back in March and was quite happy 
with its performance.

The use of planet.osm does bring up a question though. I would like my 
users (likely to be relatively small in number, being UK countryside 
users) to be able to see their edits immediately, rather than wait for the 
next planet. To minimise load on the OSM server, this is likely to involve 
local storage of the data, with the disadvantage that such data would not 
be contributed to OSM itself. 

Does anyone have any thoughts on this? One solution might be something 
similar to the TIGER import script... i.e. contribute Freemap data back to 
OSM once every hour, say (hour rather than 3 minutes as there will be much 
less Freemap data than TIGER data)....

Nick