good work, roland. seems like a lot of useful work to me.
thanks
gerhard
gary68
On Thu, 2009-05-28 at 17:47 +0200, Roland Olbricht wrote:
Hello,
the project I've been working on the last few month now into some kind of
beta
status. So I you would like a reverse gazetter or a download an area of the
size of a city, have a look at
http://78.46.81.38
In particular, this might be relevant to the topic Advanced multipolygons -
do we need area types? How well are they supported? of the London Hack
Weekend
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/London_Hack_Weekend
The idea behind the story is to have a server where one can obtain derived
data as a web service. Areas are a standard example of that kind of things:
the borders are as ways of use on their own, but they also define the area.
In the OSM database, you find only the borders represented as ways and a
relation declaring which borders constitute a certain area. So every
application must figure out the areas on its own and has to rewrite the code
and spent possibly substantial computation time (think of calculating a
nation's borders on a mobile phone) on that. That's where the OSM Server Side
Script server comes into the game: the derived data gets accessible to any
application just with a single query, and the mappers still only need to edit
and declare the independent data.
And even the rules can be edited by the user as explained in documentation:
http://78.46.81.38/#section.rule_example
So in the long term, we may also do things like preparing the data for
routing, deriving residental areas as desired here
http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/dev/2009-February/014175.html
or apply the machine readable version of the wiki as proposed here
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Machine-readable_Map_Feature_list
to detect conflicting objects in the database.
There's a lot of work to do left. So I would like to get some feedback what
to
do first. And maybe there's even somebody who would like to join the
project :)
Some issues I see so far
features:
* A spatially intrinsic query for ways: At the moment, you only can query for
nodes and then get the back references to get the data for an area. However,
this would not include ways that cross an area without having a node inside
of it. So this enhancement of the area-query would make it possible to
include also those ways.
* Mixed queries with spatial and tag-based criteria: an example would be to
find all motorways in Germany.
* Restriction of the output: If the size of the data is relevant (think of a
mobile phone as a client), the server could omit certain useless tags (like
the frequent created_by tag to reduce file size or processing complexity.
* Or other things that come into your mind ...
basics:
* Proceed with the documentation: at the moment, the documentation is reduced
to the essential things. And I don't even know whether the documentation is
helpful or not.
* Make the source code of the server accessible: The code is a bunch of C++
source files along with some bash scripts. It is quite a mess at the moment.
And I'm even not sure whether I should place it in the OSM SVN or not.
I would be grateful for every kind of feedback.
Cheers,
Roland
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