Hello there. This is a quick status update on the project to get
OpenStreetMap maps into Wikipedia and on the Wikimedia/OpenStreetMap
toolserver setup. For those that don't know what it's all about we're:
* Setting up a testing platform (ptolemy & ortelius) to serve OSM
maps in Wikipedia which can be rolled into production
* Setting up a toolserver (cassini) which interested parties can use
to write tools that use OSM data. And combine it with Wikimedia data
if they want.
Here's an (outdated!) wiki page with some more info:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/OpenStreetMap
And here's a recent talk I gave at Wikimania discussing the current status:
http://wikimania2009.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proceedings:143
Until now we only had 1/3 machines active & accessible due to various
combinations of waiting for hardware, people being busy and it being
unclear who actually got access to those machines that I won't go
into.
That one machine was the nascent WMOSM Toolserver Cassini. I set up a
prototype multilingular rendering (since ptolemy and ortelius weren't
available at the time) which you can see here:
http://cassini.toolserver.org/tile-browse/
What we need to to currently is:
* Admins to set up ptolemy / ortelius so that they replicate the DB /
mirror tiles
* Get interested users/developers to *use* cassini for their tools so
we can get neat stuff like the multilingular-country-list
(http://cassini.toolserver.org/~mazder/multilingual-country-list/).
Sign up here: https://wiki.toolserver.org/view/Account_request
* Cassini also needs some admin love
* Work on this buglist (and more bugs) to get OSM into Wikipedia:
http://tinyurl.com/nv2sap
I did most of this on Cassini (see setup notes:
http://tinyurl.com/mbblj3) but I have limited time on it (especially
until Christmas) and system administration isn't my strong suit. So
unless we get other people to help this project is going to go
*slooowly* and you won't have OSM on Wikipedia until 2010.
Before WM2009 we had the unfortunate problem of interested parties
needing to do the above not getting access due to the issues above.
However the machines are up *now* and during WM2009 uncertainties
about who could grant access were finally solved (brion will be
dictator).
So, any potential admins for ptolemy and ortelius will have to:
1. Be qualified & motivated
Preferably someone who's worked with the OSM toolchain or is willing
to learn. If you're maintaining your own ad-hoc rendering somewhere
and are running out of server space you'll probably be motivated to
get this working sooner.
2. Reveal their name & address to the Wikimedia foundation
That's a requirement Wikimedia requires of all server administrators.
3. Agree to Wikimedia's privacy policy
URL: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Privacy_policy
ptolemy and ortelius are otherwise distinct servers on the Wikimedia
network so this amounts to basically not being silly and running a
Quake III server on them, or nmap-ing the Internet.
Cassini is more sensitive and harder to gain access to since root
admins on Cassini have access to private data about Wikimedia users
(e.g. raw database access, login cookies and so on).
But in both cases we should be able to give elevated non-Unix-root
privileges. All of this pending approval by Wikimedia of course.
HI all
I just stubeled uppon an annoucement [1] that TomTom (make of GPS navigation
devices) will launch an OSS project for location aware services/data, called
OpenLR [2].
They call it a "universal location referencing technology" and call it
"map-agnostic". Not quite sure what's behind it - a collection of data layer? an
protocol for supplying and polling such data?
I didn't dig deep, just though it might interest you...
-- daniel
[1] http://ostatic.com/blog/tomtom-launches-open-source-navigation-project
[2] http://www.tomtom.com/page/openLR
--
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
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Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin,
Steuernummer 27/681/51985.
Hello,
On a side of the extension discussion I asked myself a question:
How should plain editors use the new maps?
I can imagine the following simple things that most people would
probably want to do first:
1. just put a static map in the article
2. overlay the static map with some simple layer of images (like it's
done with templates using CSS)
How should they do (1)? Our current extensions provide usually some tag
with coordinates as parameters. Do you think it would be feasible that
we could allow use of OSM URLs, so that the user can just go to OSM, pan
and zoom as they wish, pick a permalink or shortlink and paste it into
some MediaWiki tag?
Any thoughts on solving (2) better? I thinking about something simpler
than what we have now (since we should be able to provide custom layers
anyway at some point).
--
<< Marcin Cieslak // saper(a)saper.info >>
Hey,
After discussing with Ævar, we agreed that using the Maps extension [0] instead of SlippyMap to display OSM maps with OL is probably a good idea, assuming this is doable of course, which I think it is.
I am able and willing to put quite some time into making the needed changes to Maps. Before I can really start though, it would be helpful if I had the most up to date code of SlippyMap, since a lot of it's current code can be re-used. Is this the one committed to the SVN trunk? (I've downloaded that code, but it's missing at least one file and giving other errors as well.) It would also be nice if the people who are working on this end of the mapping effort give me a poke, so efforts can be coordinated, and no one goes off to create duplicate or redundant functionality.
If anyone has objections to using Maps instead of SlippyMap, please voice them, so we can discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using Maps.
These are as I see it the most important functionality to-do's:
* Migrate code from SlippyMap to Maps, mainly the static map handling
* Add the ability to display maps without any markers on them. Currently maps has several parser functions, like display_point, which will display an error when you don't provide any coordinates instead of displaying an empty map. (Should be easy to do though.)
* Optimize the code. Currenly Maps supports OpenLayers as mapping service, and allows you to display maps from a variety of mapping services. On top of that, the OL JS is far from optimal. Therefore I think it's best to simply add a new service to Maps (this is done via a hook-like system build in Maps), and create optimized handling for only OL+ OSM there, based on current SlippyMap JS.
* Optionally (probably not required in the first version) add image-as-layer capabilities, allowing users to zoom and pan around high resolution images.
Anything mission critical I'm missing there?
[0]http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Maps
Cheers
--
Jeroen De Dauw
* Forum: code.bn2vs.com
* Blog: blog.bn2vs.com
* Skype: rts.bn.vs
--
Don't panic. Don't be evil.70 72 6F 67 72 61 6D 6D 69 6E 67 20 34 20 6C 69 66 65!
During the wikimania 2009 I was following this work :
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenLayers_Dynamic_POI
for wikimania - openstreetmap collaboration
Please first check this url : http://osm.chamorro.com.ar/dpoi/
At this url you can see cassini localized tiles with info extracted from
download.dbpedia.org dumps
At low zoom levels we have a lot of info then we need to limit the info
per tile.
Now I use a random value but then I use anything else
Limit it by category/subcategory/search keyword it's fine but I want to
improve the system for
a large number of points at this time.
There are languages without tiles because I generate the index page from
a list from dbpedia.
Data are probably not correctly passed too
This is a work in progress .
-- sorry for my poor English ---
I based my work on a minimal example .
A more complex is here: http://www.freemap.sk/
Saludos , Jorge
On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 2:28 PM, Rich<richlv(a)nakts.net> wrote:
> hi. you're probably swamped with various requests, so take your time with
> response :)
>
> i was very curious when i saw your work on localisted renders at
> http://cassini.toolserver.org/tile-browse/.
>
> it motivated me to add quite some data to osm across the worls for my
> language.
>
> are you planning to update these renders ? that would allow to see progress
> and increase interest in others as well.
(CC-ing maps-l)
(I'm currently at Wikimania 2009)
Yes, we're planning on keeping them up-to-the-minute eventually. The
system on cassini was/is just a prototype pending the setting up of
the real database/rendering/tile servers.
We've just got access to those servers and hopefully we'll set them up
properly with automatic updates soon. But I can't promise anything.
But hopefully we'll get it properly running in September.
Hello OSM folks
For the integration of osm into the wikipedia there will be localized
maps in all languages that have their own wikipedia. The problem is,
that a lot of countries are not translated yet.
To get an overview over the status and make translating those countries
more easy, I created a tool that can be found at
http://cassini.toolserver.org/~mazder/multilingual-country-list/
I'd like to encourage everyone to spend some time making translated maps
better. Comments welcome!
Peter
Quick note --
It seems there's been a long serious of miscommunications and dropped
handling of access & software setup for the mapping servers, which has
led to some very unhappy people. :(
I want to make sure we get this sorted out in the next few days... for
the moment we're collecting notes on what actually still needs to get
set up here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Maps_server_setup_tasks
Once we've got that down to a clear checklist and know who needs to do
what I can bash people on the head until it happens. :)
-- brion
Hello,
I have added some thought on the overall solution architecture - most
importantly, I have added some questions and decision we should think of
before fully deploying servers (being that WMF or Toolserver's):
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Maps_server_setup_tasks#Architecture%20and%2…
I think it is important to think "out of the box" here and think about
those issues leaving low-level discussions (cassini vs. ptolemy vs.
whatever) aside for a while.
One of the important steps would be getting stats on the current geohack
and WMA usage.
--
<< Marcin Cieslak // saper(a)saper.info >>