[OSM-talk] Not-properly-Open-but-called-Open

[Frederik Ramm]

Sarah,

Sarah Hoffmann wrote:
> More of (a) would be lovely. Speaking of it, is the source code behind 
> the OSM Inspector available somewhere? It might provide very instructive 
> to see how you do the data processing.

There's nothing special about the inspector itself and if anyone is 
interested we can probably release that (just a bunch of Javascript and 
Mapserver style files). The data files which OSMI uses are somewhat of a 
side product of our Geofabrik-internal, daily "gobble up data and 
process it into all sorts of things our customers want" job. This job is 
not Open-anything (not only does nobody get the source, nobody gets a 
binary either); it would currently be a major pain to separate the 
"stuff for paying customers" bit from the "stuff for OSMI" bit.

I have updated the OSMI wiki page accordingly. My main objective with 
this thread was a desire make it clear what is open and what isn't, and 
I hope the OSMI is now a good example of that.

But since you ask about the data processing; what we basically do is 
convert OSM data into our own format (which is not much different from 
CSV) and then use all sorts of utilities to convert it into whatever we 
need. This is a constantly evolving process, and early on we heavily 
relied on PostGIS for processing, but found that too clumsy and we're 
now moving away from PostGIS for as many things as possible.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"