Andy Robinson (blackadder-lists) wrote: > Steve, you and everyone else whose worked hard on the cartography > aspects of > the Mapnik layer deserve a big pat on the back. But your note clearly > demonstrates that we really should not have the Mapnik stylesheet > maintained > and managed by one or two people.
Well, there was a discussion on IRC today among some of the [EMAIL PROTECTED] chaps along the lines of "what we really need is a benevolent dictator, like the Mapnik stylesheet has". I've got a lot of sympathy with that - most of the reason the Mapnik layer looks so cool is because it's driven by one person with a clear vision and genuine cartographic skill, rather than "ooh, I want to see pound shops on the map, let me add my nice MS Paint icon". (For the avoidance of doubt I'm not accusing [EMAIL PROTECTED] of this, but I've seen enough committee-designed maps that do look like an utter bollocks.) > I'm really wondering if it wouldn't be a good time to get a separate > project > kicked off that's separate from OSM core. One that is specifically > aimed at > developing methods of layering and filtering the OSM data to produce > customisable maps. It's clear there are loads of people that want to > put > their oar in on it and maybe taking it out of a core OSM function > might free > up ideas and development. Obviously new and cool ideas can get > incorporated > back at OSM render central but at least having cartography development > outside of central control would stir up the pot and take some of > the heat > out of the issue within OSM itself. > > I assume the big problem doing this is getting suitable bandwidth > for a tile > server? Amazon EC2/S3. With a readymade image containing an OSM rendering toolchain - Mapnik, osm2pgsql and TileCache - plus some instructions on the wiki, we'd have a "roll your own cartography kit". A WYSIWYG stylesheet editor would be the icing on the cake but not necessary at the start. I am way out of my depth here technically, but wouldn't that be so, so cool? cheers Richard _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
