[OSM-talk] Ideas for OSM enhancements

[Andy Allan]

On Dec 28, 2007 3:29 PM, Nick Whitelegg <nick150971 at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>
> Hello everyone,
>
> A couple of ideas for enhancements on the OSM site - what do people think?
> If people think they're good ideas I'll try and find time to hack on them,
> though the next month might be a bit difficult.
>
> One would be to do something similar to what I already do on Freemap, namely
> clickable POIs: The user could click on a POI then get a window containing a
> link to its Wikipedia article (if applicable) and its description tag (if it
> has one).
>
> The second (and I think this is already on the "todo" page) would be to make
> a web interface for creating Garmin maps, where a user could select an area
> and then a Garmin .img map of that area would be generated. I can see two
> ways of doing this - implement in JSP, grab OSM data through the API and
> link to existing mkgmap code, or (and much more work) reimplement mkgmap in
> Ruby to link with the rest of the site.

Garmin maps are so ridiculously efficient at compression that the work
should first be put into overcoming the (current) tiling issues and
provide country- or planet-sized maps. These used to be available (and
easy to make myself each week) but haven't been for a few months now.

Doing small-area maps may be useful too, but I would think a large
number of people like me have high-capacity garmin devices that can
take huge maps, and unless the tiling issue is overcome then the
small-areas that we can produce sans-tiling will get smaller and
smaller as the map's information density increases.

Cheers,
Andy