[OSGeo-Discuss] FW: [OSM-talk] The State of the Map

Fri Feb 9 02:26:39 PST 2007

SteveC,
OpenStreetMap has built an enviable project and community and maps, and 
as you say, you have done this by focusing on your end goals of building 
maps. You have achieved the use case which drew me to maps in the first 
place and the creation of Mapbuilder. I take my hat off to you.

Your points about technology are valid, but for the moment I'd prefer to 
focus on communities.

The OSM community contains thousands(?) of grass roots mappers, 
developers and some great maps.

The OSGeo community contains hundreds of software developers and  OSGeo 
projects often contains the support of Governments and Commercial 
projects through bodies like the OGC.

What would it take to bring these two communities together?
Maybe the development of an OSM equivalent of the WFS-T using OSM protocols?

What can be gained by such a merger?
1. OSM is likely to attract external sponsorship?
2. Both projects will develop faster if they are sharing programmers and 
heading toward common goals.
3. OSGeo projects will get better access to OSM type data.

SteveC wrote:
>
>
> Cameron Shorter wrote:
>> Does someone want to talk about how Openstreetmap and OSGeo can work 
>> in harmony with each other.
>>
>> Chris Holmes wrote:
>>>  Is OpenStreetMap considering moving to using Geoserver, or supporting
>>>  the same WFS-T protocols as geoserver?
>> They basically won't talk until we have all the features they do.  Which
>
> Oh no.. we'll talk, we (or I) just think WFS-T is a big bloated waste 
> of time.
>
> It's really two themes:
>
> 1) Don't lose sight of making actual maps.
>
> OpenStreetMap takes the KISS approach to just making a map. We've got 
> really far, and made lovely maps, with this strategy. The example 
> thread you pointed to is one that occurs periodically where someone 
> comes along and says we should be using postgis/geoserver/wfs-t etc. 
> We always ask them to come back with actual database timings or 
> similar to prove their methods are better. They never do.
>
> (As an aside, the same thing used to happen with people wanting 
> mapserver until tiles at home and mapnik got going. The list of people 
> who've said OSM would never work without a strong ontology or wfs or X 
> or Y is pretty long but these mailing list events are growing less 
> frequent.)
>
> From OSMs point of view OSGeo is building a tower of babel which is a 
> ton of use if you're Ordnance Survey but we really don't need all that 
> strong ontology, data consistency, GIS stuff.
>
> You can convert from OSM to shapefile, GML and what have you. Formats 
> and standards like these are Good Things.
>
> 2) Community
>
> Our community of people making maps, going out in the cold and rain, 
> right now, to collect street data are not, for the most part, 
> programmers. We're a pretty diverse bunch and the community is more 
> important than the technology and so more resources are thrown at 
> organising our frequent mapping parties and so on. Supporting these 
> people with simple tools is important.
>
> The simplicity of our data formats and APIs have brought in many non 
> or semi-technical people or people (many of them mappers) who wouldn't 
> usually touch code or XSLT. I can completely explain how OSM works in 
> a few minutes in the pub to a non-technical person. You can't do that 
> with WFS-T.
>
> I could extend this to talk about the difference in attitudes to data 
> on each side of the atlantic (we don't have TIGER) but I havn't 
> fleshed that out and would welcome views.
>
>
> None of this is said with particular prejudice, it's more a statement 
> of views than anything. We're holding a OSM developers workshop in 
> April in Germany if anyone wants to come, and we'd love to have 
> someone (or more) from OSGeo at our upcoming conference.
>
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Essen_Developers_Workshop
> http://www.stateofthemap.org/
>
> I'd love to make it to FOSS4G 2007 but I'm not sure I have funds for a 
> trip to canada.
>
>> is somewhat reasonable, so we're working on that, but I'm not incredibly
>> optimistic that they'll just jump over - even if we match their existing
>> feature set and do more (diffs, rollbacks, commit comments are all
>> basically done in our postgis datastore).  If you want to read a thread
>> that is pretty typical (I think) of discussions on OSM about PostGIS and
>> WFS-T and the like, see:
>>
>> http://www.nabble.com/Server-slowness-tf2928059.html 
>> <http://www.nabble.com/Server-slowness-tf2928059.html> starting with
>> Kristian Thy's email.
>>
>>
>> Andy Robinson wrote:
>>> Forward from: talk-bounces at openstreetmap.org
>>> [mailto:talk-bounces at openstreetmap.org] On Behalf Of SteveC
>>> Sent: 07 February 2007 2:38 PM
>>> To: talk at openstreetmap.org
>>> Subject: [OSM-talk] The State of the Map
>>>
>>> Note: Can people on the talk-* mailing lists please translate and 
>>> forward this?
>>>
>>>
>>> Thanks to a lot of hard work from all involved, we have a conference 
>>> web site up http://www.stateofthemap.org/  Please spread the word! 
>>> This will serve as a base for info for the upcoming event:
>>>
>>>      * The State of the Map - First openstreetmap international 
>>> conference
>>>      * Manchester, England
>>>      * 14-15 July 2007
>>>
>>> There's a Call for proposals up. Got something to speak about? We're 
>>> interested in a broad range of topics:
>>>
>>>     1. Freeing Up Access to Geodata - The political, commercial and 
>>> opensource implications of open Geodata
>>>     2. Redrawing the Map the OSM Way - GPS, surveying, data editing 
>>> methods and additional sources of base data.
>>>     3. New Uses For A New Style of Geodata - A look at new and 
>>> existing uses for OSM data.
>>>     4. Cartography 2017 - where are we headed?
>>>     5. Building Blocks for Collaborative Mapping - Data storage, 
>>> processing, scalability and delivery in a wiki-like environment.
>>>
>>> It doesn't have to be exclusively about openstreetmap - feel free to 
>>> suggest mini-talks, talks, BOF sessions, posters and more. Oh, and 
>>> it wouldn't be an openstreetmap conference without mapping all of 
>>> the city either, would it?
>>>
>>> have fun,
>>>
>>> SteveC steve at asklater.com http://www.asklater.com/steve/
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> talk mailing list
>>> talk at openstreetmap.org
>>> http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Discuss mailing list
>>> Discuss at lists.osgeo.org
>>> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>>>
>>>   
>>
>>
>

-- 
Cameron Shorter
Systems Architect, http://lisasoft.com.au
Tel: +61 (0)2 8570 5011
Mob: +61 (0)419 142 254