[OSM-talk] Bikely OSM?

[Steve Bromwich]

On Fri, 21 Sep 2007, Andy Allan wrote:

> On 9/21/07, Steve Bromwich <osm at fop.ns.ca> wrote:
>> 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?
>>
> 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).

Yes, exactly - random people throwing up their contributions a la 
bikely.com. I imagine I'd be doing most of the work to start with but once 
there's a critical mass I'd hope others would add their route, and perhaps 
have some form of rating or scoring.

> 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.

Hmmm... That's an interesting variation. 80n has seduced me with his 
clopin concept, though, so I'm going to have to spend some time thinking 
this over and waving my hands enough to power a small turbine, I think.

> 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.

Sure - that was part of my idea. I've never been hugely impressed with 
bikely beyond the basic idea, and if I can created a cycling route by 
tagging an existing route that's bound to be far more accurate than the 
slightly random clicking that bikely induces. Being able to end up with 
something that looks far more professional would certainly help locally 
when compared to the official bike map, and I think other organisations 
around the world would be interested, too.

Cheers, Steve