[OSM-talk] Relation/Routes and Hikes in open Country

[Nick Whitelegg]

>Something I keep toying with is the idea of facilitating mashups (did 
>I really just say that?) by giving masher-uppers a way to tie their 
>routes to OSM IDs.

>If you plot a favourite walk on a Google Map, you're effectively just 
>drawing lines and points on a flat map. There's no tie-up with the 
>underlying data. You might as well do it on a paper map.

>What we can offer, theoretically, is the ability to say "this walk is 
>along OSM ways 197687345, 197687343, 29587031". This is really good, 
>because it means the mashup site can actually use the data: the 
>footpath quality, where the gates and stiles are, how many miles to 
>the next pub/station, etc.

>You can do that right now, but it requires downloading a planet 
>excerpt and some heavy hacking, which is beyond the capabilities of 
>most masher-uppers. The aim, I guess, would be to make it as easy as 
>using the Google API - a nice piece of reliable JavaScript to handle 
>the API calls for all the common stuff. (There's also the issue of 
>changing IDs, of course.)

>cheers
>Richard

I've kind-of played around with this in the past: one version of Freemap 
(no longer current, but the code can be
resurrected) allowed a user to click on a right of way and annotate it 
(e.g. this path is badly overgrown): the data would then be forwarded to 
OSM via adding a "description" tag to the way.

But it would be relatively easy (now I've done much of the code) to add 
the ability to link a walking route to OSM ways, and indeed not too 
difficult to develop a JS API for this.

Nick