On Mon, Nov 02, 2009 at 11:59:38PM -0800, Mikel Maron wrote: > I've been involved in OSM for four years, and in the early days it was often > just 1 or 2 people actually building something. It took very little resources > to build a vector data commons, when the data contributions were from just a > few folks. The basics of the API was set relatively early, allowing many > tools writers to come in and out of the proejct, while the actual server > software has been rewritten many times as OSM has dealt with massive growth. > If OSM had attempted to deal with the TIGER import back in 2005, it would > have doomed the entire project .. and that's essentially the challenge OAM > has taken on up to now.
Not entirely true. There was an API, a way of interacting with it, and a catalog, before we started putting any real amount of data in. The problem was, nobody cared, because the only size of data that people care about for aerial imagery is 'everything!' (Thank you, Google.) > So I like Tiles. Tiles are a simple "standard" already widely supported by > clients and processers, and one aim of OAM should be to catalog these > techniques, promote best practices etc. For instance, see Josh's tutorial on > tiling our Kibera imagery > [http://porcupinealley.com/entries/2009/oct/15/tiling-kibera/]. This is > potentially understandable to someone with little background in GIS, or open > source .. and one potential user story for OAM could be an overworked, > non-specialist IT guy in a small municipality, who's been delivered a GeoTIFF > from an aerial survey .. how can we quickly help him get that imagery into > OAM? Tiles are one way of thinking about it, but I think that everything else you say actually doesn't speak to 'tiles', but instead to 'data OpenLayers can read'. If a service can provide a WMS layer, why do you need tiles? You just need something that OpenLayers can read; preferably with no user knowledge other than 'I want that one!' Tiles are fine for developers, but for users, they don't care about tiles. They just want a map. (This is just my experience/opinion, anyway.) > On governance, something like what Schuyler describes seems like a good deal. > We need some mechanism to move. I guess we can learn from OSGeo here. The > same with documentation of this conversation. I second Charles' call to bring > discussion into the wiki, but realistically, someone needs to step up to > focus on this. I think this is less important than a lot of people seem to think. ("Governance first" seems to sink many well intentioned projects...) But I could hardly expect to have any other opinion based on my approach to projects in general :) Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt MetaCarta _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://openaerialmap.org/mailman/listinfo/talk_openaerialmap.org
