[OSM-talk] Updated Geofabrik Download Server

[Frederik Ramm]

Alex,

On 11.03.2013 19:15, Alex Barth wrote:
> This is an awesome service. Should this or a similar shapefile export
> live one day on openstreetmap.org/export <http://openstreetmap.org/export> ?

The shapefile portion of it is actually used less than the plain simple 
OSM extract. I'm working on adding statistics to the site as well.

As for the OSMF-managed infrastructure, I'm a friend of keeping it 
small. What I would love is for the export tab to provide some sort of 
mechanism whereby various providers of extracts or derived data could 
plug themselves in and announce their goods. So if someone zooms to 
Washington DC and clicks on "export", they would see a list of available 
files in various formats from various providers and could choose which 
one to download. For a very small area you'd see "direct API download", 
for a larger area maybe "Overpass API download", and even larger areas 
would lead you to a pre-computed extract and so on.

That would keep maintenance down on the central infrastructure and 
create a marketplace for derived data (a market where IMHO the currency 
is attention, not money - even though it would even be thinkable in the 
long run to allow providers of pay-per-use services onto the platform if 
they give a cut to OSMF).

Having said that, if OSMF were to decide to run an extract service 
themselves and use the same technology that I use for the Geofabrik 
service (all open source plus a couple glue scripts) then I wouldn't 
stand in their way!

Bye
Frederik

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