[OSM-talk] Places website update

Richard Fairhurst richard at systemeD.net
Wed Nov 15 09:30:45 GMT 2006


Quoting Robert Hart <Robert.Hart at BuroHappold.com>:

> I don't see how you can do this without having some idea of how the map
> will be rendered, and at the moment OSM seems to be a huge melting pot
> of ideas about that. I would stick with putting geodata in the database
> - if that causes clash and ugly looking maps then that's an added
> incentive to come up with a real solution.

Well, automated placement of labels is a real old GIS/cartographic  
chestnut, and though there are (imperfect) solutions they generally  
require a fair amount of coding effort and computing horsepower -  
which, for OSM, could be spent on better things right now.

Rendering hints (as suggested) are a good solution but I can see the  
point about not polluting the database. One option would be to put  
them in a namespace related to that particular renderer, so  
almien:cityname. This would enable you to have a hierarchy for  
rendering at different scales, viz. almien:50k:cityname.

cheers
Richard





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