[OSM-talk] Looking Forward

[Richard Mann]

Instead of "bigger", I think the key is expanding the base of lowish-power
data consumers, by having basic tools that get you started. If people are
looking at data at the city-level, highlighting what they're interested in,
they will start making it more usable (consistent, manipulable, whatever).

To me, Maperitive (son of Kosmos) has made city-level rendering a practical
proposition. Not perfect, but pretty good.

Data-wise, I'd wonder if geofabrik's administrative-polygon approach is
optimal. At the moment I can have an English County in a few seconds, but a
few kilometres round that is 100x more work (download the whole country and
hack out a bbox). Simple rectangles (maybe two overlapping sets) might be
more end-user-friendly.

My Christmas wish would be for osmosis to have a dumb parsable export
format (ie with parent id and order-where-appropriate attached to each
record). There are undoubtedly better ways of achieving the same result,
but a simple flatfile that can be parsed on the hoof (eg in a spreadsheet)
would allow low-power users to start playing with the data.

Whatever the problem is, the solution is people. The tools determine what
sort of peple you get.

Richard
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