On 30/01/2008 11:07, Tom Hughes wrote: > Remember that the primary focus of this project, as I understand > it at any rate, is to produce data for other people to use. Making > our own maps from our data is more of a convenience for us and a > way to promote the project than our primary product.
Someone has to produce the tools or service though, whether it is under our banner or someone else's. If you're a restaurant in Chertsey who wants to print a map of your location on your flier, it is no use whatsoever to start with instructions which say 'install a database and fetch a 100Gb file off the internet'. To be practical, we (in the widest sense) have to offer pre-packaged tools and have reasonable expectations of what file sizes can be managed, how long it takes, and so on. What this means in practice, I think, is either a readily useable web application, or an modest install (which may fetch data off the internet once installed, sure, and might only be a thin front end to a remote application or fetches data from a remote database in the form, say, Mapnik needs) and which has Windows as its main target because that's what 95% of the potential user base is using. (That may mean InstallShield of something equivalent; Java is problematic because that would mean installing the Java runtime, which your restaurateur probably won't have a clue about; dependencies are anathema). Or it means offering a map production service, so that the provider, who is technologically capable, would mediate between the complex software and the user. But that probably means paying money, which rather defeats the object - you'd just be in commodity competition with other map providers there. Chances are your restaurateur will take the line of least resistance and (illegally, though they don't realise it) start with a screen shot from a 'free' Google map. David _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
