[OSM-talk] POI display on osm.org

[Peter Wendorff]

Am 21.01.2013 14:49, schrieb Roland Olbricht:
> Hello Peter,
>
> thank you for the feedback. I've moved all but 4) to
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/POI_display
> to not loose the suggestions.
>
>> 4) especially for POIs not displayed on the map it might be useful to
>> show an additional icon, as there's a "missing link" between "poi
>> nearby" and the map.
> What exactly do you mean here? Having the icons in the bubble? This is indeed a good idea, although not all feature classes have already icons.
>
> Having the icons on the map is unlikely possible, because there might be simply not enough space on the Mapnik map.
Well, that's the problem I refer to.
Mapnik tries to show as much icons as possible while keeping a certain 
distance in between and so on.
Your POI display queries the whole database independent of the POIs in 
fact displayed on the map itself.
If I get a popup saying something about 3 restaurants, but I only see 
one or two, that looks strange and I have no idea, where the third one 
might be on the map. With the comparable low distance threshold you 
implemented, that's not that big thing (as long as the user has an idea 
which area has been queried; a corresponding highlighting circle has 
been suggested already), but guessing where on the whole screen an 
additional restaurant might be, while that is not displayed, is a bad issue.

A perfect solution here might be to extend Mapnik to report as 
additional meta data to a tile the objects rendered (and/or skipped), 
but that's out of scope of your demo of course.

A perhaps easier to implement solution would be to show icons for every 
POI in the bubble, using icons as close as possible to the icons of the 
map stylesheet. Ideally the result would be that whenever a POI is shown 
in the message bubble, this POI is shown on the map (as an overlay 
icon/temporarily and probably due to the original tiles.

regards
Peter