[OSM-talk] OSM Server Side Script

[Gary68]

good work, roland. seems like a lot of useful work to me.

thanks

gerhard
gary68



On Thu, 2009-05-28 at 17:47 +0200, Roland Olbricht wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> the project I've been working on the last few month now into some kind of beta 
> status. So I you would like a reverse gazetter or a download an area of the 
> size of a city, have a look at
> 
> http://78.46.81.38
> 
> In particular, this might be relevant to the topic "Advanced multipolygons - 
> do we need area types? How well are they supported?" of the London Hack 
> Weekend
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/London_Hack_Weekend
> 
> The idea behind the story is to have a server where one can obtain derived 
> data as a web service. Areas are a standard example of that kind of things: 
> the borders are as ways of use on their own, but they also define the area.
> In the OSM database, you find only the borders represented as ways and a 
> relation declaring which borders constitute a certain area. So every 
> application must figure out the areas on its own and has to rewrite the code 
> and spent possibly substantial computation time (think of calculating a 
> nation's borders on a mobile phone) on that. That's where the OSM Server Side 
> Script server comes into the game: the derived data gets accessible to any 
> application just with a single query, and the mappers still only need to edit 
> and declare the independent data.
> 
> And even the rules can be edited by the user as explained in documentation:
> http://78.46.81.38/#section.rule_example
> 
> So in the long term, we may also do things like preparing the data for 
> routing, deriving "residental areas" as desired here
> http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/dev/2009-February/014175.html
> or apply the machine readable version of the wiki as proposed here
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Machine-readable_Map_Feature_list
> to detect conflicting objects in the database.
> 
> There's a lot of work to do left. So I would like to get some feedback what to 
> do first. And maybe there's even somebody who would like to join the 
> project :)
> 
> Some issues I see so far
> 
> features:
> * A spatially intrinsic query for ways: At the moment, you only can query for 
> nodes and then get the back references to get the data for an area. However, 
> this would not include ways that cross an area without having a node inside 
> of it. So this enhancement of the area-query would make it possible to 
> include also those ways.
> * Mixed queries with spatial and tag-based criteria: an example would be to 
> find all motorways in Germany.
> * Restriction of the output: If the size of the data is relevant (think of a 
> mobile phone as a client), the server could omit certain useless tags (like 
> the frequent "created_by" tag to reduce file size or processing complexity.
> * Or other things that come into your mind ...
> 
> basics:
> * Proceed with the documentation: at the moment, the documentation is reduced 
> to the essential things. And I don't even know whether the documentation is 
> helpful or not.
> * Make the source code of the server accessible: The code is a bunch of C++ 
> source files along with some bash scripts. It is quite a mess at the moment. 
> And I'm even not sure whether I should place it in the OSM SVN or not.
> 
> I would be grateful for every kind of feedback.
> 
> Cheers,
> Roland
> 
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