Written last night, so some of this goes over ground already covered. At one stage someone was doing a canal & waterway map, but I think those involved have other time commitments, like maintaining OSM editors and doing the default cartography. Nick Whitelegg has Freemap which is aimed at walking. A number of maps cover Europe in the categories you mention, for instance Lonvia's hiking map, Hike and Bike map, OSMC Reitkarte (riding & hiking, germany & surroundings), OpenBusMap, and so on. There are postcode maps, POI overlay tools, etc. as well. Contours are not part of OSM for a range of reasons. So virtually all the things you would like to see exist, but each is done as a separate project by an individual or group with a particular interest. So invisible isn't really fair: but I would accept that these are not immediately obvious.
A lot of these projects share common problems: hosting (costs, access etc), maintaining up-to-date data, development work. OpenBusMap for instance has not updated for several months for these reasons. The ever increasing volume of data in OSM doesn't make life easier for people running these projects. Not to forget that people have jobs, families, holidays, and like to go mapping too! Much of the leg-work that does happen tends to go into tools to help improve the quality of the data. So the most useful map renders tend to be one which help mappers to see things which have been missed, or errors in data entry. On the other hand, there is also a tendency for things that get rendered to get mapped. There are also tools like Maperitive & Kosmos which allow rendering on the desktop of subsets of data, such as power, public transport etc: the rendering rules can be shared. Also the Cloudmade site allows customised rendering. Of course it would be nice to have dedicated hardware for serving a range of UK-based maps, as some of the more tedious aspects of maintaining current data could be shared. However, we don't have a UK umbrella organisation for OSM, and the folk who might be able to maintain such a server already spend lots of their free time keeping the worldwide OSM platform going. Jerry ________________________________ From: Chris Moss <mosch...@googlemail.com> To: talk-gb@openstreetmap.org Sent: Mon, 17 January, 2011 23:05:56 Subject: [Talk-GB] invisible I'm interested in the GB waterways and it seems there's quite a bit of work done but it's totally invisible. Is anyone working on a layer like the cycle map, which leaps out from the overlays as the only minority interest yet developed? It's not the only layer I'd like to see. What about walking paths, railways, contours, points of interest, postcode areas, administrative boundaries, constituencies, bus routes, etc., etc. Shouldn't maps allow you to concentrate on whatever you're interested in? Can someone please explain to me how or if this can be done with openstreetmap? Chris _______________________________________________ Talk-GB mailing list Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
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