Hello everyone,
Thought I'd email this as I have some thoughts as to how Freemap
(free-map.org.uk; countryside-orientated mapping for UK users) could operate
without excessive demands on a single server.
Basically, I'm wondering if anyone has unused server space/bandwidth allowances
who might want to become part of a distributed Freemap. It is a not-for-profit
project, so there would be no financial comeback, but just thought I'd ask in
case anyone is interested in participating.
The plan I have is something like this. Freemap aims to provide the following
services:
* custom rendering of tiles for the whole of the UK, in a style geared towards
highlighting features for walkers (rights of way, permissive paths etc) and
distinguishing between physical properties of paths and legal access rights
(showing both as two layers, i.e. ROW status as semi-transparent top layer)
* add annotations (interesting views, path blockages etc) via web or mobile
interface
* allow users to plan walks via web interface and then play walk routes in
the mobile app
* a web service which provides POIs and OSM ways/polygons in a format optimised
for rendering. Queries can be by Google tile or by bounding box in a range of
projections. The underlying DB is the standard osm postgis DB so the data is
not generated in OSM format but in a format which reflects the underlying DB
structure. See for example
http://www.free-map.org.uk/ws/trsvr.php?x=4079y=2740z=13.
* a web service to deliver SRTM or OS LandForm Panorama data, no need for any
additional servers for this, I can handle this myself.
(The web services are currently used by Android and WebGL clients to render the
data in 3D and to find nearby POIs)
The distributed architecture I would have in mind is:
* each server deals with a particular box within the UK
* the master server (my own) would deal with dispatching requests to the
appropriate server depending on bbox
The requirements of the other servers would be:
* standard OSM postgis DB installed
* osmosis and osm2pgsql installed
* shell access for cron job updates
* postgres DB to store height data, as per the relevant OSM wiki page:
consequently gdal needs to be present.
I would supply:
- Freemap source code, hopefully with some kind of installer
- script to set up the Freemap-specific DB tables
- cron scripts to fetch relevant data from Geofabrik on a regular basis (every
2 weeks probably sufficient) and update the database.
- relevant NASA SRTM height files
If you are participating, feel free to suggest changes to the default
stylesheet (or even make them yourself!) and hack on the code.
Would anyone be interested?
Thanks,
Nick
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