Major improvements to MapOSMatic [LWN.net]

From:		Thomas Petazzoni <thomas.petazzoni-AT-enix.org>
To:		lwn-AT-lwn.net
Subject:		[ANNOUNCEMENT] Major improvements to MapOSMatic
Date:		Tue, 5 Jan 2010 09:04:42 +0100
Message-ID:		<20100105090442.1933903c@surf>
Archive-link:		Article, Thread

Hello LWN,

In Septembre, you covered the release of MapOSMatic, a service to
generate city maps from OpenStreetMap data
(http://lwn.net/Articles/351961/). Therefore, the following
announcement might be of interest to LWN readers, particularly the fact
that we now support the whole world and not only France.

As a new year's present, the MapOSMatic team is proud to announce that
a new version of the maposmatic.org website has been put online, with
major improvements over the initial version announced in September 2009.

For the record, MapOSMatic is a website that allows to generate city
maps from OpenStreetMap data. Each map is divided into squares to
easily find streets and is delivered with the corresponding street
index.

The new MapOSMatic provides the following improvements :

 * Support for the whole world. Any location in the world can now be
   rendered on maposmatic.org.

 * OpenStreetMap database updated daily. Until now, the database had
   never been updated since the service was started in September
   2009. Now, the geographic database used to render the maps is
   updated daily, providing maps with the latest contributions to
   OpenStreetMap. Each map contains the date at which it was
   generated.

 * Better city search engine. Thanks to Nominatim, we now provide a
   search engine that allows to find cities in a much more usable way:
   cities with the same name can be distinguished and the search works
   even when the city name is not completely correct.

 * Support for other languages. A few parts of the map rendering
   process is language-dependent and we now have the infrastructure to
   use language-dependent code. For the moment, we support English,
   French and Italian, but we are waiting for your contributions to
   support other languages. The website has also been translated to
   German and Italian.

 * Amenities in the index. In addition to the streets, we have added
   important amenities to the index: schools, town hall, post offices,
   places of worship, etc.

All these improvements are available now on

  http://www.maposmatic.org

You can follow the progress and improvements of MapOSMatic on our blog
at http://news.maposmatic.org. MapOSMatic is of course free software,
you can fetch its source code and contribute to the project, see
http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/maposmatic/.

Do not hesitate to send us your feedback, comments, suggestions and
contributions to contact@maposmatic.org.

Cheers,

The MapOSMatic team
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni                         http://thomas.enix.org
Promouvoir et défendre le Logiciel Libre http://www.april.org
Logiciels Libres à Toulouse              http://www.toulibre.org

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Major improvements to MapOSMatic

Posted Jan 5, 2010 22:22 UTC (Tue) by PaulWay (✭ supporter ✭, #45600) [Link]

Yes, the "LWN Effect" has kicked in :-)

lwn'd (pronounced "loaned")

Posted Jan 6, 2010 0:25 UTC (Wed) by Webexcess (subscriber, #197) [Link]

hey, there's slashdotted and farked, why can't sites get lwn'd?

lwn'd (pronounced "loaned")

Posted Jan 6, 2010 21:24 UTC (Wed) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]

If they could, I suspect that LWN's finances would be a lot better off. :)

Major improvements to MapOSMatic

Posted Jan 6, 2010 14:50 UTC (Wed) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link]

They provide source, so you can run your own local copy instead of waiting in the queue.

Major improvements to MapOSMatic

Posted Jan 6, 2010 15:30 UTC (Wed) by tpetazzoni (subscriber, #53127) [Link]

Of course, MapOSMatic is completely free software. The full source code is available at http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/maposmatic/.

In fact, the MapOSMatic web service is "only" provided for convenience. The real work is done by a Python module we implemented, called OcitySMap (available from the same URL). This Python module does the actual rendering job, but the installation procedure, while documented in an INSTALL file, is relatively complex (PostgreSQL + PostGIS + Mapnik + Cairo + Mapnik-OSM + import of a OpenStreetMap dump into PostgreSQL using osm2pgsql). That's why, for normal users, we provided a web service.

Major improvements to MapOSMatic

Posted Jan 6, 2010 21:10 UTC (Wed) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link]

What about WMS/WFS support with, for instance, UMN Mapserver? That would enable dynamic serving of the data for all sorts of OGC-compliant applications.