OpenStreetMap
The last of the tiles for my uk rail map are uploading now, and it's looking rather good.
http://kaerast.blogbound.com/ukrail.html
I've not gone to a very high level of zoom because it's taking forever to render tiles, and I want to learn what to do with it next - ie. how to make it searchable and routable, how to only render changed tiles in the future, how to find a spare server for rendering/hosting this, etc.
Discussion
Comment from smsm1 on 15 December 2008 at 23:59
This is awesome.
Comment from njd27 on 6 January 2009 at 13:16
Wonderful work. I wonder would it be possible to render water features on the map to give a bit more context?
Comment from kaerast on 6 January 2009 at 13:31
What did you have in mind? If it's easily retrieved using xapi and adds context then I don't see why not.
Comment from njd27 on 6 January 2009 at 14:46
The main thing is that London looks rather strange without the Thames at the moment. But it does give some idea of relief elsewhere in the country. I don't know if anyone has a set of base tiles with shaded relief from the SRTM data?
I guess you'd need waterway=riverbank/river.
Comment from njd27 on 6 January 2009 at 14:52
I did find the recipe for doing hill shading in the end
osm.wiki/HikingBikingMaps#Hill_Shading
Apologies if this doesn't interest you!
Comment from kaerast on 6 January 2009 at 16:51
Hill shading is going to use a lot more cpu and memory than the little rendering server I'm using has. It's struggling with the addition of waterways. I'm aiming to come back to this tomorrow to at least add in the Thames, for rail maps I'd consider hill shading overkill but you've got me interested now so I may try and add it.