From: Nick Whitelegg [mailto:nick.whitel...@solent.ac.uk]
Sent: Friday, December 06, 2013 4:59 AM
Subject: [OSM-talk] Hobbyist OSM Data Server?
So I'm wondering whether we could, if enough people raise contributions,
have an OSM read only, hobbyist server which could be used to host
not-for-profit, open source (only) projects. it could be either global
or just for the UK (or any other individual country). It could contain a
copy of the OSM PostGIS database then developers could be free to host
server side code which delivers that data in whatever format fits their
own needs (GeoJSON, some binary vector format, or anything else).
You should keep in mind the dev server (errol), both for running
whatever you want to and when planning additional resources if you need
them. You can find information on the dev server at
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Using_the_dev_server.
The dev server has an osm2pgsql database, kept up to date every hour and
imported with hstore and extra attributes (metadata). This is a fairly
flexible schema, but it's not too widely know that it's running as a
shared resource. It is suitable for rendering and many types of analysis
queries, and more flexible than pgsnapshot, apidb or another schema
closer to the original OSM data. The database is on the RAID5 array of
7200RPM drives, so it's not exactly fast IO, but it keeps up and isn't
maxed out.
The server is of course a shared resource, and suffers from the same
problem of any shared resource: others badly written code may end up
impeding your access. Of course what you're proposing can suffer from
that same problem too.
The EWG has periodically discussed how the dev server could be more
useful, and I know reasonable feedback and ideas are welcome, either at
the meetings on Monday
(http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Engineering_Working_Group#Meetings)
or on the dev@ mailing list.
___
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
