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I know very little about Open Street Map, but wondered if it would be a good vehicle for getting local residents to map their own resources for emergency response preparedness. If I wanted to indicate a "command center" in a neighborhood (such as a school) how would I do that? (Insert my own text label.) Would it be possible to customize for one group of people (such as a neighborhood association) with a password if not all the data was for the public, but might be kept private for the group making the map? |
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Most of that data like "use this school for the command center" and "here lives old Bert who will need help leaving his house" do not belong in OpenStreetMap. They exist only be consensus in the group, are not objectively verifiable by other mappers and might violate Bert's right to privacy if available to the whole world. (And data in OpenStreetMap is always available to the whole world for reading and editing, no exceptions.) But that doesn't mean that you can't use OpenStreetMap. You can use OpenStreetMap as a base layer, store the additional data you want in an own database (or even just a text file) and display them as an overlay in your map. For a simple solution you would save the coordinates of all the locations you need (you can use OpenStreetMap to derive them) and then use a password protected website that shows tiles from OpenStreetMap and markers from your private database using OpenLayers. For online editing capabilities you would have to create a website that offers either a custom build of potlatch 2 or using an OpenLayers installation with an OpenStreetMap base layer and an interactive vector layer like http://latlon.org/sketch has. This is obviously quite a bit more work but would allow easy edits by others in your neighborhood. PS: Some information that is objectively verifiable like the position of fire hydrants is suitable for OpenStreetMap. |
