[OSM-talk] Bringing OSM to walkers - countering negative attitudes

[Nick Whitelegg]

On Monday 07 May 2007 07:31, you wrote:
> Nick Whitelegg wrote:
> > Am I actually completely deluded about walkers being interested in Free
> > mapping? It would surprise me, because my own needs in this area were
> > what brought me to this whole Free mapping thing in the first place.
>
> To my mind, Freemap is a lot more usable than openstreetmap simply due to
> the presence of the contour information. Even when driving it is nice to
> know what the road is doing vertically and what you can see from your
> current location. The fact the elevation data is stripped from the GPS
> tracks is a major mistake in my book.
>
> Given that the data is available, how difficult would it be to create a
> scalable layer similar to the NPE map layer that could be used with the osm
> data layer to provide contours?

Not difficult at all - in fact I've already implemented it :-)
The only trouble is that it looks horrible when overlaid on top of the main 
OSM maps, because the contours overlay the roads.

What I've done with Freemap is generated a shapefile of the contours of most 
of England (not the whole of the UK yet) and used Mapnik to layer areas, 
contours and roads in that order.

That said, if there is interest in a SRTM WMS server I can dig it out and make 
it available.

Nick