Maps-l April 2009

maps-l@lists.wikimedia.org

17 participants
14 discussions

[Fwd: [Toolserver-l] Policy changed to accomodate OpenStreetMap projects.]
by Daniel Kinzler 28 Apr '09

28 Apr '09

fyi -------- Original-Nachricht -------- Betreff: [Toolserver-l] Policy changed to accomodate OpenStreetMap projects. Datum: Tue, 28 Apr 2009 23:23:09 +0200 Von: Daniel Kinzler <daniel(a)brightbyte.de> Antwort an: toolserver-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Organisation: Wikimedia Deutschland e.V. An: toolserver-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Hi all Wikimedia Germany has decided to help the OpenStreetMap community, and one part of this help is providing a place to play with OpenStreetMap-replated projects on the Toolserver cluster. The policy <https://wiki.toolserver.org/view/Rules> has been changed to reflect this. Section 2 now reads: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Use of the toolservers must be related to a designated affiliate project (see below). This rule will be strictly enforced as violations are an abuse of donated resources. If you are at all unsure if something you want to do is appropriate, contact ts-admins first. 1. Designated affiliate projects of the toolserver are currently 1) The Wikimedia Foundation and any of its projects and 2) OpenStreetMap and any of its projects 2. The use of specific resources like databases or login servers may be reserved for use with specific projects. For instance, some resources may be set asside for use for OpenStzreetMap-related projects. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- If you want to start playing with OSM stuff, please be patient for a few more weeks. Hardware has been ordered (more about that later). -- daniel _______________________________________________ Toolserver-l mailing list Toolserver-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/toolserver-l -- Daniel Kinzler Software Developer Wikimedia Deutschland Phone +49 30 219 158 260 Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Help us achieve that! http://spenden.wikimedia.de/ Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V. Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter der Nummer 23855 Nz. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985.

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Re: [Maps-l] WMDE to buy servers
by Tels 24 Apr '09

24 Apr '09

Moin, On Thu 23/04/09 05:54 , Daniel Kinzler daniel.kinzler(a)wikimedia.de sent: > Hi all > > To keep you posted and to clear up some previous confusion, here are a > fewpoints about what is going to happen about the servers Wikimedia Germany > (WMDE)is going to Provide for OSM. Ah, thanx for the update! Just one question I couldn't read the answer out of your post: Will it be possible to get access to the OSM API via http to that toolserver (just like http://api.openstreetmap.org)? All the best, Tels

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WMDE to buy servers
by Daniel Kinzler 23 Apr '09

23 Apr '09

Hi all To keep you posted and to clear up some previous confusion, here are a few points about what is going to happen about the servers Wikimedia Germany (WMDE) is going to Provide for OSM. * WMDE will buy the servers. We already have a quote for them (as specified by Jens), which is currently being looked over by the WMDE board. If they agree, we can order soon (next week, perhaps). * There will be two servers (one for the database, one for tiles and renderer) in the main Wikimedia infrastructure - that is, they are run by the Wikimedia Foundation. These are the "production" servers for integrating maps in Wikipedia. * Mark Bergsma will sort out the details for the production servers. At the very least, Jens will have access to them, and perhaps Avar too. * There will be an additional server for people to play with, the "Map-Toolserver". This will be integrated into the existing Wikimedia Toolserver cluster. That is, it's run by Wikimedia Germany. * The Map Toolserver will be supervised by the Toolserver admins; Avar will get admin access there and focus on providing any OSM-specific tools and services on that box. * Access to the Map Toolserver will be available to anyone with a project related to OSM. No connection to Wikimedia is required (this point was clarified to me by Sebasitan today). Besides that, the rules will be the same as for the rest of the toolserver (see <https://wiki.toolserver.org/view/Rules>). * For you to decide is who should be in charge of reviewing applications for accounts - Avar told me he wasn't interested in that. Another question is if "regular" toolserver users should get access per default, restricted only be the policy that whatever they do on the Map Toolserver must be relevant to OSM. I would favour this, as it makes things a lot easier for admins, and it invites people to play with OSM data. * The Map Toolserver will be running a local MySQL instance (and perhaps als PostGres) for OSM databases. It will also have OSM-specific software installed (talk to Avar). It will not have capacity to process the whole globe for everyone, so try your project on smaller datasets. * Root access to the Map Toolserver will only be avialable for "full" Toolserver admins. To get that kind of access, approval of the Wikimedia Foundation is needed. Since this level of access also grants access to private data if all users of wikimedia projects, it is handled restrictively. "Local" root access is not technically feasible. * I suggest the domain maps.toolserver.org for the Map Toolserver - using the toolserver.org domain makes things easier internally. Having an alias like tools.openstreetmap.org or something would be possible. I hope this clears up any questions. I hope we have these babies up and running soon :) Daniel Kinzler Software Developer Wikimedia Deutschland Phone +49 30 219 158 260 Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Help us achieve that! http://spenden.wikimedia.de/ Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V. Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter der Nummer 23855 Nz. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985.

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Hello :) was: Welcome to the "Maps-l" mailing list
by Tels 16 Apr '09

16 Apr '09

Moin, I'd like to say hello, coming over here from Heise: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/135887 This project sounds very interesting to me, esp. as I am currently developing an AJAX application that renders OSM data in the browser. :) Actually I didn't want to announce my project yet, as it is still quite rough and WIP. But I am interested in working with you and hopefully I can offer some insight and help. And in return maybe we can build a faster XAPI server that can return smaller datasets? ;) As for the actual work, is there more information yet than this mailing list and the talk page: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:OpenStreetMap/de ? So far I haven't found much other information. All the best, Tels -- Signed on Thu Apr 16 18:33:01 2009 with key 0x93B84C15. View my photo gallery: http://bloodgate.com/photos PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email. Mediawiki graph-extension: http://bloodgate.com/perl/graph/

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OSM talk for Wikimania
by Daniel Kinzler 14 Apr '09

14 Apr '09

Hi all The deadline for submitting talks for Wikimania as tomorrow, April 15. http://wikimania2009.wikimedia.org/wiki/Call_for_Participation I think it would be great to hear about OSM integration there, a lot of people are interested in that. I am submitting a panel session for the toolserver, so a short presentation could be part of that, but I think OSM deserves a full presentation. Any takers? Or is there something planned already? -- daniel -- Daniel Kinzler Software Developer Wikimedia Deutschland Phone +49 30 219 158 260 Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Help us achieve that! http://spenden.wikimedia.de/ Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V. Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg unter der Nummer 23855 Nz. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/681/51985.

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GeoHack URLs and their components
by Lars Aronsson 14 Apr '09

14 Apr '09

In the Swedish Wikipedia, there are only 12,600 coordinates in 10,600 articles. That is only 3 percent of all articles. These numbers need to increase, and we're looking into various ways. Just before we start to add coordinates to lots of articles, some questions: For small places, should we just add "type:landmark", or does it make sense to clarify what is a church, what is a museum, what is a statue, what is a grave, what is a remarkable tree, and so on? These types of objects could be marked with different symbols on a map, or you could select which kinds of objects you want to display. Today, GeoHack or WikiMiniAtlas don't do any of that. Is there a established procedure for adding new type values? For villages/towns/cities, it is a custom to add type:city(9876) with the population in parenthesis. But is this supported by GeoHack or WikiMiniAtlas? Does the presentation scale (zoom level) really change with the population? Or what purpose does the population number really serve in the GeoHack URL? Translating from population to map scale can only be a rough guess, since some cities are densely packed, and others are spread out. Do we need to specify scale for each place, in addition to type (and population)? Of the 183,000 coordinates in the German Wikipedia, some 76,000 specify the physical dimension, the diameter in metres, using the parameter "dim", for example type:city_dim:25000. It seems that this value is often one tenth of the scale parameter. Is this supported by GeoHack or WikiMiniAtlas? Is it planned to be supported in the future, or is it an old feature going away? It is common that the coordinate template for creating the GeoHack link is called indirectly from an infobox template. In that case, the infobox template takes parameters such as lat_deg, lat_min,... In the Swedish Wikipedia, we have tended to go away from that and instead call the coordinate template directly from each article. Is one way better than the other? Is there a global trend? How will the introduction, presumably later this year, of inline maps from OpenStreetMap, effect the questions above? -- Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

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What's being done and what needs doing?
by Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 08 Apr '09

08 Apr '09

Firstly it's great to see so much interest in this project, we now have approx. 60 subscribers to this mailing list just a few days after it poofed into existence. What's the current status of the new boxes Wikimedia-DE is donating, and more importantly, do we have people interested in setting up the required infrastructure there? I.e. the Planet.osm -> DB -> Mapnik tile generation process? Someone at the hacking days volunteered to do mapnik stuff but I forget whether we had a DB admin yet. Anyway, what I've been working on is the MediaWiki related stuff mentioned in the techblog: http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/04/openstreetmap-maps-will-be-added-to-w… I started by hacking the SlippyMap so that it supports multiple maps per page: http://u.nix.is/phase3/index.php?title=Slippy_Test It's still somewhat hacky, e.g. it duplicates the whole OpenLayers template for each map. Could someone more familiar with OpenLayers please refactor it so that it's possible to just call a function to include the map, something like: <script type="text/javascript">include_slippymap( lat, lon, zoom, ....)</script><noscript><img src="http://static.map/lat/lon/zoom</noscript> I'm not asking for the *extension* to be edited (although that would be great), just fore a HTML/JS example. Note that this is probably easier in OpenLayers trunk due to OpenLayers.Layer.OSM being included now: http://trac.openlayers.org/ticket/1950 (But I don't know if we want to run OpenLayers trunk) There are also some more OpenLayers-related issues on the wiki page for the extension: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Slippy_Map_MediaWiki_Extension#Know… In particular the Attribution issue & snapping to lat/lon 0/0. And it it enough to have the alternate static map inside <noscript>? Does this work on all the odd browsers out there that we want to support? If so that'll make everything else much easier. As for the static map this is how the Export tab on the OSM site does it: http://trac.openstreetmap.org/browser/sites/rails_port_branches/api06/app/c… I.e. it redirects to the cgi-bin/export script on the tileserver, which is a python program which renders directly from the database: http://svn.openstreetmap.org/sites/tile.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/export For example: http://tile.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/export?bbox=-18.1343,65.676,-18.0711,… Except on Wednesday you'll see an empty map (only coastline) if you look at that, since the osm2pgsql import is running on the tileserver. I don't know whether that's something that's a problem we could hack around in our own setup while updating the Planet mirror, maybe by keeping two database copies. Or maybe by just creating static maps from the tiles themselves instead, although they'll still have this problem if an area that hasn't been pre-rendered is requested, OSM itself is serving 404.png for tiles where that's the case since it's a Wednesday. In any case we need lat/lon/zoom to bbox/scale to use that script as-is. What else needs be done/hacked up and who's interested in doing it?

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Wikimania - Call for participation
by Aude 08 Apr '09

08 Apr '09

The call for participation for Wikimania 2009 closes on April 15. I think we should submit a panel or more on mapping topics, including the OSM project but also on the topic of coordinates, DBpedia, etc. We should also do a workshop on OSM, as a preconference workshop (how to contribute data to OSM, etc.) There probably is space to do a short workshop during the conference. I would like Ævar also to be there to present (maybe on more technical, back-end aspects?) and help with workshops. And, I would like to also present on some aspect of the OSM project (maybe on front-end aspects or from user point-of-view, or on future developments) and there is room for more presenters and help with workshops. Please let me know if you are interested in presenting something, and I can help coordinate and give guidance on submitting. There is a possibility of scholarships for presenters, though I'm not involved with scholarships so can't make promises. -Kate

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Signpost article
by Aude 07 Apr '09

07 Apr '09

I'm the tech beat writer for the Signpost (newspaper) on English Wikipedia. This week's edition of the Signpost features a story about the OpenStreetMap project. I wrote the article in a rush, but wanted to get it in by the deadline for this week. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/Tools/Single Next week, I can cover other things that happened at the developers' meeting. -Aude

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Re: [Maps-l] [Wikitech-l] A proposal to simplify and improve geo markup in Wikipedia
by Lars Aronsson 07 Apr '09

07 Apr '09

Håkon Wium Lie wrote: > I've analyzed Wikipedia's HTML code for representing geographical > coordinates. The current code is verbose and does not support the Geo > microformat correctly. Three alternatives, differing on functionality > and code size, are suggested as replacements: > > http://www.princexml.com/howcome/2009/wikipedia/geo/ > > Alternative 1, which is comptible with Wikipedia's current syntax for > personalized presentation, reduces the number of elements from 14 to > 10. Alternative 2, which uses CSS generated content to achieve > personalized presentations, reduces the number of elments from 14 to 5 > and the code size from 798 to 248 bytes. This fits in with other approaches to geographic information, and I suggest we all use the new maps-l mailing list for all of this. 1) More articles ought to have coordinates, in all languages of Wikipedia. Is this also relevant to Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikinews, Wikiquote? 2) We need some quality assurance, to make sure we have the right coordinates for each place. Making it easier for normal users to verify and update coordinates would be helpful. Usability project? 3) Coordinates can now be specified in many different ways, but we ought to have fewer, more standardized ways (templates). 4) The output of the templates should be as useful as possible: * link to the GeoHack page, * geo microformats, * <span class> markup that can be modified by personal CSS/Javascript, * in the future also inline maps from OpenStreetMap. Could we write a specification for what a coordinate template should be able to handle? Could someone write a history of how Wikipedia's coordinate templates have evolved over the years? Håkon, did you only look at the English Wikipedia? Different languages have different coordinate templates. When I ask around, the Germans are convinced that their new template is the best, but they can't give a short summary of why this is so. -- Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se Wikimedia Sverige - stöd fri kunskap - http://wikimedia.se/

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