[OSM-talk] Mapnik has busstops

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

> The Mapnik renderer (on both sites) uses some black magic for
> coastlines.

AFAIK, coastline data on the lower zoomlevels is taken from a non-OSM  
source.

> This bug in the Mapnik renderer might be
> the last hope for the Tiles at home subproject.

Funny language you're using. The raison d'etre of the t at h system is  
providing current renderings of OSM data; if someone else does that  
better, then we do not need the complicated t at h stuff any longer and  
nobody is going to be unhappy about that. You sound like you expect  
the t at h participants to say: "Phew, are we lucky that mapnik has this  
bug, otherwise we'd be out of business". But there's no reason for  
that; we are all in the same business.

> If Mapnik gets
> coastlines right

... and bridges, and tunnels ...

> and planet.osm is dumped on a daily

... or hourly ...

> basis rather than weekly, Tiles at home might go the way of the  
> dinosaurs.

I expect it will. I currently see tiles at home as something that is  
more agile and has a broader participation, a sort of testbed for  
things that, if successful, can be adapted by mapnik. By actually  
displaying existing coastline with short re-rendering turnarounds,  
tiles at home now provides a real incentive for people to go and fix  
their local coastline, something that mapnik can only profit from.  
Also things like the proposed cycle layer, the maplint layer and so  
on are interesting experiments that, if successful, should be adapted  
by the mapnik platform.

In the long run, I see osmarender as a niche product for creating  
maps of a local area on your own PC, and I expect that a non-XML  
based approach will be used to render our slippy map(s) from live  
data. (We have been talking about data replication, a replication  
tree with "trickle-down" live updates; there's no reason why one of  
the leaves in such a tree should not be a PostGIS database with the  
structure required for live mapnik rendering.)

But it would be dangerous to abandon tiles at home just because in a few  
years we expect to have something that is better in every aspect. I  
believe tiles at home will continue to produce good ideas for some time.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00.09' E008°23.33'