Hi, On 07/30/2012 12:16 PM, Jaak Laineste wrote:
Technical proposal: what about setting up a shared GIS server somewhere next to Mapnik renderer, so it would provide both usable CMS and hosting for this kind of datasets? So community can upload their shapefiles with metadata there, Mapnik can use them and other community renderers can download and use them too if they need to. Technically there are already some shapefile-based datasets in mapnik renderer (coastlines hosted in SVN); what is missing is a scalable interface to add other external datasets.
There are a number of organisations attempting the same already. For example, the "WeoGeo marketplace" hosts many free shapefiles, and so does a github repository run by Development Seed/Mapbox (who want to make it easy for TileMill users to access shapefiles). Even ESRI is in that game.
There are several opensource GIS server packages which could be good fit, Geoserver seems to be closest to me. Sure, it has a lot of GIS stuff we don't really need right away, and may miss some features, but it seems to have good base to get started with it.
But don't kid yourself - the amount of free datasets around is huge and will easily use up any capacity we can build up. I would of course much prefer such a solution to everybody dumping their stuff into OSM because then it is easier to access (many people behind imports to OSM don't even want to bother setting up their own renderer - they believe that once stuff is in OSM, we'll conventiently render it for them). But even this approach has its limits, and we're likely to reach them quickly. The basic question remains the same: Is it part of our mission to collect and re-distribute free data that we're not the owner of?
Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail [email protected] ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ Imports mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/imports
