[Tilesathome] planet.osm based lowzoom ?

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

deelkar:
>> Then you can just take the mapnik tiles for z0-11...

spaetz:
> Actually, that is what I would prefer and propose. 

What I don't like about Mapnik is the use of non-OSM data on some of the 
smaller zoom levels. This means that there'll aways be a "gap" - you 
might zoom in and suddenly not see something anymore that was there on 
the lower zoom level (because it was taken from a non-OSM source and you 
have now zoomed to a level that has only OSM stuff).

I have been thinking about various ways of complementing the overloaded 
t at h infrastructure, and down that way may also be a lowzoom solution. I 
think that the clients should not only upload tiles to the tile server, 
but perhaps also

* upload statistics information (e.g. how many objects in the tile just 
rendered, how many maplint errors, ...) to a statistics server

* upload the level-12 tile just generated (or a special "lowzoom base 
tile") to a special "lowzoom generating" server which would collect 
level-12 tiles and (having a full set of current level-12 tiles 
available) automatically re-generate all lowzoom tiles affected whenever 
a level-12 tile comes in and upload them (only changed ones) to the tile 
server

* maybe even (or alternatively) upload a filtered version of OSM data to 
a central lowzoom server which would then use that to generate lowzoom 
tiles with osmarender and inkscape.

The servers on the receiving end of these uploads would not be 
mission-critical and could be hosted by more or less anyone - no need to 
put this in a central location where things are so far out of control 
for us that it takes several weeks to set up new accounts (*grumble*).

Of course all this is much more expensive overall than just using mapnik 
tiles but having more-or-less current data in one of serveral 
representations chosen by us is the "uniqe selling point" of t at h and for 
me this does not stop at zoom level 12.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00.09' E008°23.33'