[OSM-talk] i18n-rich areas on the map

[Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason]

On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 7:08 PM, Mikel Maron<mikel_maron at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> The rest are now up at http://cassini.toolserver.org/tile-browse/
>
> These are great!!
> (though I think we may just have crashed your renderd with loads of
> requests)

That was part of the plan:) Let's see how it does with added caching though.

> I realize this is just a proof of concept, but is this generally your plan
> right now,
> to generate tile sets for every language, with caching?

Yes but on-demand as they're added to pages on Wikimedia projects with
the Slippy Map extension. We're not aiming for having a general
purpose google-maps-alike in 279 languages but rather just a way for
users to embed maps into articles in their language.

Those articles will each have their own peephole view of the planet so
hopefully we won't have to generate a huge amount of static maps /
tiles for each language.

> Since the underlying geometries are the same for all tiles, and only the
> text changes,
> one thought has been to decouple these into different tile sets (geoms and
> various localised text tiles),
> which are then combined on the server before pushing out, or on the client
> in OL.

Yeah a basemap + text would be neat. But I couldn't find a way to do
it so I thought I'd try the brute-force way first and see how it
works.

> This would reduce space requirements, and load on the database.
> Not sure how much more cost it is to overlay the text on geom tiles, on the
> server,
> but there are possibly clever ways to make this efficient.
>
> There's a need for this on osm.org itself. If an efficient way to localise
> tiles can be found
> through your work on wikipedia, it's all very good!