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=4079&y=2740&z=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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