[OSM-dev] Status of the WMS interface?

[Jo Walsh]

On Wed, Mar 29, 2006 at 11:49:20PM +0000, SteveC wrote:
> > i have some questions about the status and future of OSM's Web Map
> > Service, http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/WMS 
[on not getting the street layers that are in the GetCapabilities]
> you're too zoomed out. The tile engine will show streets below a certain
> bounding box size, eg here
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/index.html?lat=51.518357834190404&lon=-0.09819086718750002&zoom=11

Now i recall the IRC discussion about this; until there's a strategy
for generalising streets or "prioritising" them, you're looking for
more hardware resources that can handle rendering a lot of streets better.
I should have remembered that you use the WMS internally for OSM's map
display on the website, and joined the dots.

> > future, and how it's possible, if desirable, to offer help.
> 
> In reverse order: Send me computers or money (we are getting hardware
> donations from elsewhere but no guarentee they're any good). The plan is
> to keep the URLS and add better rendering and render at more zoomed out
> levels. URL should be fine and stable.
> 
> Oh, and the mooted OSgeo landsat server may or may not help (for us that
> is, but I see the point in it generally!). It's not really that useful
> if it's in the US though. We can host one or more at UCL but need
> computers or money :-|
> 
> Well, that's not entirely true. Departments at UCL and other unis in
> the UK have complete landsat servers and I'm working on letting us use
> them, but that's just the landsat layer.

What OSGeo hopes to offer is just starting to be specced out. The plan 
that's forming at http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Geodata_Repository
is driven by the telascience group at UC San Diego's offer of hosting
facilities for any and many kinds of open licensed, reusable geodata. 
They did a lot of ad-hoc data collection and redistribution around
Hurricane Katrina - http://katrina.telascience.org/ - and already are
mirroring onearth.jpl (though the WMS interface to it is moving at the
moment) and BlueMarble. If you need archiving facilities for images of
the OSM dataset in shapefile and GML forms, this could be a good connection.

Looking for university projects who are already hosting Landsat WMS
facilities, reminds me of the email conversation we had with Jeremy Morley 
of http://iceds.ge.ucl.ac.uk/ who are just offering Landsat5 and SRTM.
I see they've moved from RedSpider to Mapserver now. 

Connected to this is an attempt to solidify the scheme for a
distributed WMS tile cache that's been floating in the geosphere for a
year: http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/WMS_Tile_Caching

This only addresses half of your problem (getting the Landsat
layers with reasonable speed) and not the other half (processing
overhead making the street layer rendering too slow) but it's worth
keeping an eye on. Especially if local universities are interested in
helping but worried about bandwidth usage...

thanks,


jo