Hello, here are some personal notices from fossgis-conferences[1] in Osnabrück. It was a nice meeting we a lot of open-source GIS-developer and a lot of friendly OSM people.
Special interesting was the contact with Sven Geggus, admin of dev.openstreetmap.de. We saw that we have the same problems on his server and on toolserver, so that it will be good to stay in contact. A specially, an efficient database structure with all tags to build something like the XAPI would be very nice. One solution could be perhaps the postgres hstore [2]. Also the no-sql-databases like couchDB (geocouch)[4] and MonetDB were hot topics.
There was a speech with a lot of listeners from mazdermind about the status and the future chances of our wikipedia-osm-cooperation.[5]
We saw in a community session after this talk that not so many WP/OSM-people have the knowledge to work with GIS tools and GIS databases. So it seems necessary to give more people a starting point. I like for this the usage of live systems [3]. This problem was for me a reason to start on toolserver-wiki a little first step tutorial [6] and I listing there some tools that now running on toolserver. Feel free to add things that I have forgotten.
So I get over the days many new ideas how both projects can profit in the detail: *We can use the wikipedia-interwikilinks to bring this datas into OSM for interlingual maps. *If we could bring the Wikipedia geocoded objects into Openstreetmap (by the half-automatic way I posted in the past), the Wikipedia objects could be drawn better in a map with nice icons with the help of OSM-tags. (We have too many landmarks objects in the wikipedia dataset.) *We can use GIS-tools like GDAL with GDAL2tiles.py e.g. to split huge commons-images in tiles and present them faster with openLayers as TMS[7], so that the user don't need to download the whole file.
Greetings Kolossos
[1] http://www.fossgis.de/konferenz [2] http://developer.postgresql.org/pgdocs/postgres/hstore.html [3] http://www.fossgis.de/projekte_gislive.html http://www.lingner.eu/discosm [4] http://gitorious.org/geocouch/ [5] http://www.fossgis.de/konferenz/2010/attachments/66_OpenStreetMap und die Wikipedia.pdf [6] https://wiki.toolserver.org/view/OpenStreetMap [7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tile_Map_Service