By Agron Selimaj, fellow community member living and working in U.S. Link: http://www.flossk.org/en/blog/project-proposal-map-tile-distribution-and-master-directory-map-tile-distributors
> During a recent mapping project implementation at work I realized the open > source map content is limited and that the resources to share that content > are even more limited. There a few map tile servers out there all of them > using resources of open source volunteers, and those servers are being > hammered by millions of users. The map content is not usualy a light > content, it's all bitmap images the are already compressed. Many servers > go offline because they can't take the load or that they have reached their > maximum bandwidth for the day. > The number of people volunteering to host the tiles is small because the > tiles ocuppy about 1.2 TB of disk > space<http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tile_Disk_Usage> . > But that's for the whole world. > > Here's the solution. > > 1. Let's create a subdomain mdmtd.flosk.org (for Master Directory of > Map Tile Distributors) > 2. Let's create a little PHP script that allows volunteers* fetch a > protion of tiles from the main servers* directly into their servers. > Everyone needs to run this script on their own servers, we will share it > when a new volunteer is registered. > 3. Let's also create a database to tell the world that this new > regional tile hoster is mirroring tiles for x,y region with radius of m > miles. > 4. Let's create and submit patches for a few major javascript layers, > like OpenLayers, Mapquest for OSM etc. so that these scripts lookup our > database at mdmtd.flosk.org. > > These volunteers most likely have created a program or a web application > that may be specific to a region. Let's take http://prishtinabuses.info/ for > example. Why would thousands of Prishtina citizens download Prishtina maps > from California? Well, first of all there is no map tile server in > Prishtina. Even if there was one, OpenLayers doesn't about it. > > Also, there seem to be a lot business applications that are used in large > corporations inside their intranets. We can offload these corporations > easily by redirecting them to their internal map server. > > And just before I finish for tonight let me just say what we need: > > 1. Issue tracker > 2. Bugzilla > 3. GIT or SVN server > 4. Subdomain (to be under FLOSSK for next thousand years) > 5. Mysql server > 6. Apache server > 7. 2 PHP programers > 8. 2 Javascript programers > 9. Web artist > 10. Technical writer > 11. Blogger > 12. Mailing list > 13. Support forum > > This of course is a summary of an entire mapping ecosystem. I will > continue with detailed design description for each item in the next blog/s.
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