Grass roots re-mapping efforts, focused on Europe. Crowd-sourcing. Pretty nice cartography. See the maps here: http://www.openstreetmap.org/
Note the pubs shown on the map via the Pint glass on the map. Nice.
Has features not in other maps - foot paths (dashed red lines), Pubs etc.
Starting in the US based off Tiger data, and updated.
Simple data model. Nodes, Ways (lines, or polys if node1 = nodeN), Relations
Runs on MySQL. 30,000,000 records. All changes stored. No "geo" columns, just points. Use scaled integers instead of doubles, and some saucy indexes. "SDE like" tiled indexes.
Planet.osm - rendering format in Xml. ~4Gb. Released weekly. From there you usually load it into PostGres with a Geocolumn, and then push this out via Mapserver, or GeoServer, or subset as you need.
Site runs in Ruby on Rails. OpenLayers for the slippy map. Off-line and on-line editors. All stored in Subversion
API was RESTful from day 1. http://www.openstreetmap.org/api/0.5/node/45
Every object has keys and values associated with it. Community process for selecting keys and values. Keys and Tags must be approved, or features will not be on the map. There are 100's of tags.
Mapnik (apparently easier and simpler than MapServer) c-based tool that uses a huge Xml file for styling (looks like SLD?). Runs off the Postgres version of the OSM data. Tiles are created on request, and cached. There is a background tile cacher daemon. Tile cutter is on one box, cranking like 20 million tiles a day.
Osmarender - Xml --> Xslt --> SVG. Slow to convert. Rendering is done across a network of end-user PCs.
Tiles match the Google scheme, which makes mashups easy.
Now moving onto mobile platforms
OSM is topological from the start, so it supports routing. Currently there are some simple routing options, but until the data density is higher, it's not too useful. High-performance routing is CPU intensive, and no plans to add that as a service.
Lots of other projects going on, so check it out over at openstreetmap.org.
I'm Dave and this is my blog. I'm usually writing about .NET Software Development, ArcGIS, or Agile Practices, but other stuff does creep in from time to time. I hope you find something of use, and feel free to contact me if you have any questions. You can also check out my profile on LinkedIn
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