|
I'm a part of an initiative who wants to create a digital and physical eco map of Amersfoort (A town in the Netherlands). In this local map we want to gather as much sustainable shops as we can. We want to use OpenStreetMap because it fits our open and knowledge sharing philosophy and because it's easier to use OpenStreetMap in physical maps. One of our dilemma's is that we would like to establish some serious criteria on what "sustainable" means for us. (More precisely, we want to give shops a levels of how sustainable they are.) But we also want to lower the bar for people who want to add addresses, so we would like to enable everyone to add addresses. One of the solutions we came up with is to give every address an pending or approved status. This way everybody can add addresses, keeping our map up to date and it enables us to show visitors which shops we approved as being "sustainable". Is there a way to implement this in OpenStreetMap? Have one of you guys have experiences in similar situations? The second challenge is how to build the digital map. We though it would be great to add this information straight into the general OSM data. I found examples that seem to want to do that, like: DisabilityDescription and Hiking. But I didn't find an example of a map that actually show that data. I did however find the openstreetbrowser, which seems to show data like public transport. We would actually like to show it in a matter that resembles a OpenLayers POI layer, using custom icons and info bubbles, but that seems limited to data from a separate source, like an external CMS and not OSM data. Do you guys have any tips in this matter? If we can't use OSM data, do you guys know a good CMS for this job? (I personally only really know Wordpress and Drupal.) Your help is much appreciated! |
|
To answer your second part first: I would recommend where possible, to add your information to the main OSM database. This means anyone is able to contribute to it, plus other people can use it for their own projects if they want. Depending on what your information is, you may need some extra tags to specify this. It is worth checking to see what tags are currently in use first, then you can look at the tag proposal process on the wiki or discuss this on the tagging mailing list. To show this on a map using OpenLayers, you will have to extract your data from OSM. This can be done using XAPI, then you can convert it to format that can be shown as an overlay on the map, possibly "OpenLayers.Layer.Text" or KML format. For your first question of approved data, this may be a bit more complicated. One of the main points of OpenStreetMap is that anyone can edit it, so if using the main OSM database, there's not really any way to stop others from adding or editing it. You could use an extra tag, eg something like sustainable=level_2, then only show things with that tag on your map. Though note OSM tags should (where possible) be verifiable, so you would have to define what "sustainable" actually means, which could be complicated. And there's nothing stopping other people from adding or changing the "sustainable" tag themselves. If its just for you own project, with your own definitions of sustainable, it may be better to do this with some processing of the data. eg download the data from XAPI, then use some sort of script to check whether it is on your "approved" list or not, before displaying it on your map. Note there are a few other projects making "sustainable" maps using OSM, so you might want to look at what they are doing. One example is Sustainable London Map. It has some useful technical details explaining how the data is extracted from OSM and displayed on the map. |
