[OSM-talk] Getting Started

[Nick Black]

Hello Brett,

Welcome to OSM.

On 2/22/07, Brett Henderson <brett at bretth.com> wrote:
> I've just started making some edits around Melbourne in Australia (where
> I live).  Using the various bits of info on the wiki, tutorials, etc
> I've managed to reach a point where I can be relatively productive using
> a combination of the online applet for street tracing and JOSM for
> adding ways and metadata.
>
> However, I have a few questions.  Apologies if the info is available
> somewhere.
> 1. I'm a bit confused between mapnik and osmarender.  It seems like
> mapnik is newer but osmarender has more features.  Are there plans to
> phase one out or do they target different audiences?

Osmarender is a "home grown project", that was started by 80n and has
been developed exclusively for OSM.  The major difference is that
Osmarender takes natives OSM XML and produces SVG XML in one step.
There is support for more features because it has grown with the
community.  Mapnik was developed externally to OSM, and has been on
the scene since November 2006.  Mapnik reads from either a shapefile
of a PostGIS database, which adds an extra step to the rendering
process.  Because mapnik has not been developed internally, the
community are generally less sure of how to use it to acheive results,
which is why Osmarender supports more features.  There is a
cartography day planned for next weekend in Oxford (UK), at which the
carto wiz kids of OSM are going to improve Mapnik rendering.  There
are no plans to phase either out and I think OSM would loose out if
either renderer was dropped.

> 2. Are there ways I can force refreshes of the tile data?  The Melbourne
> maps seem pretty old in the slippy viewer both for mapnik and
> osmarender.  I've managed to get the tiles at home application running and
> can generate tiles, but I'm not sure how to get a login id to upload the
> results.  I've emailed Owj as mentioned on the wiki but haven't heard
> anything back yet.

Try asking on irc: irc.oftc.net #osm - OJW is about there quite a bit.
 The Mapnik layers re-render based on how many times they are
requested.  I can see this being a problem for emergent areas like
Melbourne though.  Maybe we need to think more about this strategy.

> 3. Is there any other interest in Melbourne?  There are a small number
> of edits already existing, is there any way of finding out who created
> them?

Asking on the list is one way to do this at the moment, another is to
try something like:

http://www.openstreetmap.org/traces/tag/australia - which only works
if there are associated GPS traces.

Good luck,
>
> Cheers,
> Brett
>
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>


-- 
Nick Black
--------------------------------
http://www.blacksworld.net