I'm interested in providing a facility whereby users can create and edit copies of OSM data for a small region, say 16 sq miles (~40 sq km). This is for a project [0] that I'm working on which would allow for users to experiment with adding/removing walking and bicycling infrastructure around a school to see how the changes impact accessibility (i.e. how many more kids can walk or bike to school given a specific change). While I'm quite a ways from implementing a full web app for all of this, I'd like to understand the challenges I'd be facing.
I'd like to allow all of this to be done via a web interface, and I think Potlatch2 would be a good editor to provide. For that I'd need to set up a server side API, for which I believe the "rails port" is the only option. For a given school, it's possible that there could be dozens of users making changes to the same area, and each user may want to try out different combinations of changes. Therefore it makes sense to introduce the concept of "scenarios", where each scenario consists of a copy of the main OSM data. Users should be able to create, copy, and destroy these scenarios on demand. <begin-uninformed-conjecture> Each scenario should likely exist as a separate set of tables in the database sharing a unique prefix. A fork of the rails port would then need to be modified to allow the URL to specify which scenario (prefix) to use, and would then query those tables. Potlatch2 could then point to this scenario-dependent URL for the API, and everything would work magically. :) Seriously though I have no actual experience using the rails port or Potlatch2 (as a developer), this is all based off my reading of the wiki documentation, and I'm sure things are much more complicated and this project would require extensive modification of the rails port, if not necessitating writing something from scratch. I also have no idea how this sort of implementation would scale up to thousands of scenarios. Thanks for your input, -Josh [0]: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Safe_Routes_to_School_Mapping_Toolkit _______________________________________________ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev