SteveC,
OpenStreetMap has built an enviable project and community and maps, and
as you say, you have done this by focusing on your end goals of building
maps. You have achieved the use case which drew me to maps in the first
place and the creation of Mapbuilder. I take my hat off to you.
Your points about technology are valid, but for the moment I'd prefer to
focus on communities.
The OSM community contains thousands(?) of grass roots mappers,
developers and some great maps.
The OSGeo community contains hundreds of software developers and OSGeo
projects often contains the support of Governments and Commercial
projects through bodies like the OGC.
What would it take to bring these two communities together?
Maybe the development of an OSM equivalent of the WFS-T using OSM protocols?
What can be gained by such a merger?
1. OSM is likely to attract external sponsorship?
2. Both projects will develop faster if they are sharing programmers and
heading toward common goals.
3. OSGeo projects will get better access to OSM type data.
SteveC wrote:
Cameron Shorter wrote:
Does someone want to talk about how Openstreetmap and OSGeo can work
in harmony with each other.
Chris Holmes wrote:
Is OpenStreetMap considering moving to using Geoserver, or supporting
the same WFS-T protocols as geoserver?
They basically won't talk until we have all the features they do. Which
Oh no.. we'll talk, we (or I) just think WFS-T is a big bloated waste
of time.
It's really two themes:
1) Don't lose sight of making actual maps.
OpenStreetMap takes the KISS approach to just making a map. We've got
really far, and made lovely maps, with this strategy. The example
thread you pointed to is one that occurs periodically where someone
comes along and says we should be using postgis/geoserver/wfs-t etc.
We always ask them to come back with actual database timings or
similar to prove their methods are better. They never do.
(As an aside, the same thing used to happen with people wanting
mapserver until [EMAIL PROTECTED] and mapnik got going. The list of people
who've said OSM would never work without a strong ontology or wfs or X
or Y is pretty long but these mailing list events are growing less
frequent.)
From OSMs point of view OSGeo is building a tower of babel which is a
ton of use if you're Ordnance Survey but we really don't need all that
strong ontology, data consistency, GIS stuff.
You can convert from OSM to shapefile, GML and what have you. Formats
and standards like these are Good Things.
2) Community
Our community of people making maps, going out in the cold and rain,
right now, to collect street data are not, for the most part,
programmers. We're a pretty diverse bunch and the community is more
important than the technology and so more resources are thrown at
organising our frequent mapping parties and so on. Supporting these
people with simple tools is important.
The simplicity of our data formats and APIs have brought in many non
or semi-technical people or people (many of them mappers) who wouldn't
usually touch code or XSLT. I can completely explain how OSM works in
a few minutes in the pub to a non-technical person. You can't do that
with WFS-T.
I could extend this to talk about the difference in attitudes to data
on each side of the atlantic (we don't have TIGER) but I havn't
fleshed that out and would welcome views.
None of this is said with particular prejudice, it's more a statement
of views than anything. We're holding a OSM developers workshop in
April in Germany if anyone wants to come, and we'd love to have
someone (or more) from OSGeo at our upcoming conference.
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Essen_Developers_Workshop
http://www.stateofthemap.org/
I'd love to make it to FOSS4G 2007 but I'm not sure I have funds for a
trip to canada.
is somewhat reasonable, so we're working on that, but I'm not incredibly
optimistic that they'll just jump over - even if we match their existing
feature set and do more (diffs, rollbacks, commit comments are all
basically done in our postgis datastore). If you want to read a thread
that is pretty typical (I think) of discussions on OSM about PostGIS and
WFS-T and the like, see:
http://www.nabble.com/Server-slowness-tf2928059.html
<http://www.nabble.com/Server-slowness-tf2928059.html> starting with
Kristian Thy's email.
Andy Robinson wrote:
Forward from: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of SteveC
Sent: 07 February 2007 2:38 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [OSM-talk] The State of the Map
Note: Can people on the talk-* mailing lists please translate and
forward this?
Thanks to a lot of hard work from all involved, we have a conference
web site up http://www.stateofthemap.org/ Please spread the word!
This will serve as a base for info for the upcoming event:
* The State of the Map - First openstreetmap international
conference
* Manchester, England
* 14-15 July 2007
There's a Call for proposals up. Got something to speak about? We're
interested in a broad range of topics:
1. Freeing Up Access to Geodata - The political, commercial and
opensource implications of open Geodata
2. Redrawing the Map the OSM Way - GPS, surveying, data editing
methods and additional sources of base data.
3. New Uses For A New Style of Geodata - A look at new and
existing uses for OSM data.
4. Cartography 2017 - where are we headed?
5. Building Blocks for Collaborative Mapping - Data storage,
processing, scalability and delivery in a wiki-like environment.
It doesn't have to be exclusively about openstreetmap - feel free to
suggest mini-talks, talks, BOF sessions, posters and more. Oh, and
it wouldn't be an openstreetmap conference without mapping all of
the city either, would it?
have fun,
SteveC [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.asklater.com/steve/
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--
Cameron Shorter
Systems Architect, http://lisasoft.com.au
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5011
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254
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