[OSM-talk] The Proposed Great Colour Shift

[Lester Caine]

On 23/08/15 00:12, Frederik Ramm wrote:
>> Only a lack of people willing to do the work.
> A lack of people willing to do the work *and* host the style. We'll
> happily include them if they meet the criteria you mention, but we're
> not currently set up to serve multiple styles ourselves.
> 
> We might be able to switch to vector tiles somewhere down the line,
> allowing us to serve more styles easily, but that requires a lot of
> people willing to do a lot of work ;)

I can't believe that I am the only person who is stuck in a sort of
no-mans land in relation to OSM. Time is a commodity that is in short
supply for many of us, so ideally we want to make the best use of it.
What I would prefer to be  spending time on IS adding data and while
I've a growing backlog of material which I should like to add, much of
that relates to historic development of the current data, so CURRENTLY I
do not have a crib sheet to follow to add material which substantially
relates to current object, but includes elements which may come under
the classification 'abandoned railways'. The sections of railway
information are only a part of the historic element and includes other
objects which are currently being adapted or replaced, and I currently
don't see ANY point in migrating random pieces of history to OHM, when
the bulk of the context is still on OSM. I can be confident that the
material is buried in the change log, but that does not make it usable
for rendering, and THAT is the problem here. Just as people can omit
'abandoned railway' tag from their own rendering, 'old road or old
building' should also be selectable ... and in my book, all that is
missing currently is correct rending of 'start_date' and 'end_date' in
conjunction with the historic material such as 'abandoned railway'.

Yes I know that end_date is a crude structure as is start_date, but
currently they are all that exists to provide a chronology of when
objects appeared on the map and in what form. That a base map would only
contain object with a current valid start_date and end_date allows new
development to be mapped but not yet displayed, and the evolution to
that new development still to be maintained in the database. This is
more about CURRENT history than adding past events but a solution should
cover both.

Up until now while the differences between the rendering in various
tools was irritating, it was reasonably manageable. I don't see that the
current planned change will be reflected in all the tools quickly? And
more of a problem, if some tools follow 'old' practices then things will
be even more confusing for newcomers?

Now I am TRYING to get my head around all of the extra stuff I need to
provide a private rendering system and I've just had to do a hard reboot
of the server as it froze trying to render a sample picture of where
I've got to, so I need something a bit more stable before I can use it
in the open. Even with an 8 core processor and 32Gb ram it's struggling
with a small extract, but then the UK slice does have a larger volume of
data for the area?

http://lsces.co.uk/storage/attachments/71/2071/osm-lsces-z11.png should
explain partially where I've got to. Shields on the road numbers seem to
be inconsistent. Need a few less on some roads, and actually include
some on others. The other problem is as you should be able to see the
main traffic routs are on secondary roads (yellow here), but a number of
key roads are actually tertiary or unclassified and I think I need to
actually re-tag them so that the gaps in the routing grid are properly
represented. Of cause the hill structure would go to explain a few gaps
in that grid ...

I'm trying to get self sufficient, but that is simply not an easy job
with so many different tools used in the background!

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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