[OSM-talk] Actually using OpenStreetMap and the usabilityof the current maps

[Inge Wallin]

On Monday 28 July 2008 16:24:01 Jukka Rahkonen wrote:

> Tilesets are for sure great for serving maps effectively for big audience.
> However, we have already seen that predefined layouts will never make
> everybody happy.  Perhaps one day old-fashioned map servers which are
> rendering maps on demand will have more place again. A public WMS server
> delivering OSM data through  together with a user contributed library of
> SLD files for styling would be a nice thing to see. Unfortunately it would
> most probably be overloaded and slow :(

For what it's worth...  In the next version of Marble[1], we plan on 
supporting what we call 'vector tiles'. This means giving all the points, 
vectors and polygons of a certain square as one dataset. This dataset will 
then be rendered on the fly by Marble.

We hope to achieve at least two advantages:
  * The vector tiles will hopefully represent less data than the pixel tiles.
  * We will be able to create dramatically different renderings from the same 
data, thus removing the limitation of the pre-rendered tiles.

Watch out for more about this in 6 months or so.

	-Inge

[1] http://edu.kde.org/marble/