[OSM-talk] New Zealand coastline and mapnik

[Jon Burgess]

On 24/12/2007, Alex S. <maps at swavely.com> wrote:
> Jon Burgess wrote:
> > I can update the renderer to use a different shapefile fairly easily
> > but the issue right now is that the coastline data is incomplete for
> > the rest of the world (with most of the US underwater).
> [..]
> > It would be a lot easier if we could use the new data for the whole
> > world and get rid of the vmap0 data but are still missing large parts
> > of the North America and Eastern Europe.
>
> I stopped importing coastlines when I saw the argument about deprecating
> it and purging the db of uploaded coastlines in favor of the vmap0 data.

I don't remember anyone saying that.

The current Mapnik layer does ignore anything with natural=coastline
in favour of vmap0 & PGS derived shapefiles but I don't think anyone
thinks that is a long term solution.

> Am I to understand that that policy has changed?  I don't want to spend
> a bunch of time working on importing just to have it all scrapped in a
> month.

If you look at the OSM coastline data [1]  then I hope you can seen
why we could not have used it for the current Mapnik layer. The vmap0
data has problems but it has been the only data to give us global
coverage to date. I really appreciate the effort which Kleptog has
made to make these maps available. The OSM data has come a long way in
the past few months but it needs to be better before we can use it
globally.

1. http://tile.openstreetmap.nl/coastlines.html

-- 
    Jon