Brian wrote:
Ok, to clarify, the viewer there is open source. We
could just create a
mediawiki extension that integrated the viewer. But then...we still need
map data on our servers. Of course we've been talking/toying about/with
ways to do that for a while :)
yes, openlayers is BSD licensed.
Can you tell me more about how to build such an extension? Are there any
examples I could read?
It would be great for wikipedia to run a mapserver on its own servers.
Basic global map data, like VMAP0, is trivial to setup. There are a
couple good open source mapserver engines that I would be happy to help
setup --- just ask.
Before that happens, anyone wanting to use this is welcome to use the free
map server provided by MetaCarta. That's the default in the openlayers
drop down menu.
It's worth pointing out that maps are as richly varied as the humans who
read them, so no single group will ever have all or even a significant
fraction of the interesting maps. The purpose of openlayers is to make it
easy to display map images from any mapserver. The drop down menu that
you see in those examples allows you to choose from a small selection of
the freely accessible map servers already running in many very different
places on the Internet.
If this really catches on, we could possibly talk with
archive.org about
hosting static image tiles --- it only takes about 150TB of storage to
have a reasonable tiling of Earth.
John