[OSM-talk] OSM gets mentioned in KDE4 keynote speech at Google Headquarters

[Jon Burgess]

On Mon, 2008-01-21 at 10:56 +0000, Matt Williams wrote:
> On Monday 21 January 2008 10:42:54 Andy Allan wrote:
> > I think it's pretty impressive that for a multi-day KDE event, all
> > about their new 4.0 release, that we get practically 5 entire minutes
> > of their main keynote speech turned over to the promotion of OSM,
> > instead of promotion of KDE! It's not like we got mentioned in an
> > incidental speech, or one about Marble specifically. And given that
> > they develop an office suite, the talk about ODF support was an
> > illustrative aside during the talk about OSM support!
> 
> Well, we're all about freedom, and free mapping data is a new idea to many 
> people. Aaron was clearly amazed by OSM and I guess he just hoped that people 
> listening would be too.
> 
> > Is anyone here helping the Marble developers with this? It would be
> > nice to help out if they want custom tilesets or the like, and make
> > sure that we can crowbar as many OSM-derived maps into the application
> > as we can get away with.
> 
> Marble already has the ability to download a set of low quality Mapnik tiles 
> (about z=8 or something I guess). From what I understand there's currently 
> plans to get tile streaming working so that you can go down to almost any 
> zoom level.
> 
> I'll ask Torsten or Inge what exactly they're planning since I agree that this 
> is an excellent opportunity to show of the amazing work that OSM is doing.

I exchanged several emails with Torsten back in December after he found
this thread with a screenshot I did
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2007-June/014396.html 

I produced a 21800x10800 bitmap image for him to match the projection
that Marble uses (using Mapnik) and have not heard of anything since. I
guess this is what you can download via the "Hot New Stuff" / DXS.

The previous marble maps have used a single large bitmap as a base with
cutting and down sampling to make smaller tiles. The support for
downloading tiles on the fly is still being worked on (as mentioned in
the KDE video). 

The existing Marble base images use a Plate-Carree projection and are
cut up into 675x675 pixel tiles. I don't know whether this applies to
the tile layer support too. They may not be able to use our existing map
tiles. I mentioned to Torsten that we have the tools available to
produce tiles in whatever projection is needed and that I could help out
if either KDE or OSM wanted to render and host the tiles.

	Jon