[OSM-talk] Bikely OSM?

Andy Allan gravitystorm at gmail.com
Fri Sep 21 18:14:19 BST 2007


On 9/21/07, Steve Bromwich <osm at fop.ns.ca> wrote:
> On Fri, 21 Sep 2007, Andy Allan wrote:
>
> > On 9/21/07, Steve Bromwich <osm at fop.ns.ca> wrote:
> >> I'm not so much looking for custom tiles as a way to do overlays. Since
> >> this is an unofficial bike map I don't think it's appropriate to pollute
> >> the database with what I consider usable streets for biking, particularly
> >> since there are one or two (literally) bike lanes in downtown Halifax
> >> already.
> >
> > Sure. But if you were to store your data somewhere, I'd suggest in a
> > clone of the OSM db. Then you can get a potlatch interface for people
> > to scribble their routes on (you could use the osm tiles as the
> > background instead of yahoo imagery). Then you'll have all your routes
> > in .osm format, and it's trivial to render them to additional tiles
> > with transparent backgrounds and overlay them on the normal tiles.
>
> Hmmm... That's an interesting approach. My plan was to use tiles from
> openstreetmap and then overlay with a javascript doodle (a la bikely);
> since Halifax isn't completely mapped I'd like it to pick up the latest
> tiles as they're mapped, and that seemed the easiest way. Being able to
> edit routes in potlatch would be very handy, though - do you (or anyone
> else) know if there a way to have the OSM tiles as background (instead of
> the satellite view) so that routes can be overlaid on top that way?
>
> > Of course, this might well be overkill. There's probably a georss or
> > similar to describe routes that openlayers will handle, but I don't
> > know about that.
>
> Well, I'm still at the handwavey stage anyway, so I'm looking for ideas
> and pointers - thanks for the help!

The question for me is how you want to create the javascript doodle
information - I presume you're thinking of community contributions (as
opposed to just one or two admins creating the routes). In which case,
a slight variation would be to use potlatch to create the route, but
instead of it saving back to your server, it just saves it to a
discrete osm file. This would make it easy for other people to rate
the route, give it tags and treat the whole route as an entity (ala
Bikely) rather than how we treat it.

Of course, as soon as I wrote 'entity' in the paragraph above, a whole
new set of possibilities opened up in my mind!

Let us know how you get on. If this thing works for Halifax, it would
probably work for many other local cycle campaign orginisations, and
it would be nice to have a turnkey solution for them using osm instead
of google.

Cheers,
Andy




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