[OSM-talk] Enabling communities to use OSM as a planning tool

[Rory McCann]

Donald Allwright wrote:
> Perhaps what would be more useful would be the possibility for people to 
> have their own 'supplementary' database which they use to store their 
> own data - which they could then tag in whatever way they wish, without 
> affecting the main OSM database. How easy would it be to make this 
> possible? So for example, people's custom renderers will pull data from 
> OSM, followed by the custom database(s) and then render accordingly. I 
> suspect this would be fairly easy to implement as only the data 
> extraction stage should be affected. If we make it trivially easy for 
> people to add this capability then OSM becomes generically much more 
> useful, without becoming cluttered with data that might turn out to go 
> nowhere.

I don't like the idea that the main openstreetmap database would have 
non-real things in it. I think if one downloads the planet.osm, one can 
assume all the data in there is one the ground.

This is the same sort of problem Wikipedia had. Wikipedia is a proper 
encyclopedia, but people like wikis. So there is wikia 
<http://www.wikia.com>, where you can get your own wiki based on 
wikipedia code. People use this for wikis for TV shows for examples.

Something similar would be benefitial for openstreetmaps. If you could 
create your own wiki that would 'inherit' the main OSM database. You 
could then add your own nodes/ways/relations. All the OSM data would be 
there in read only mode. Ideally you'd be able to use your own custom 
rendering rules.

Of course anyone can talk, it's up to someone to make the code. :P


Rory