Hosting map on my own server

General talk
#1

I’m fairly new to GIS mapping and I’d like to host a mapping data of particularly Pakistan on my server. I’ve so far

  • Downloaded basic OSM files of Pakistan (lines, polygons, simple_roads)
  • Converted data to PostGIS
  • Installed GeoServer to host the map

My questions are:

  1. Is there a better / easier way to serve maps (hosted)?
  2. Can I download the data directly from openstreetmap.org? I found the osm files from a third party site and they’re pretty basic.
  3. I’m currently looking at two flash-based clients to serve the maps (OpenZoom.org and OpenScales.org). Does anyone know a better client?
#2

Hello. :slight_smile:

The way OSM does it is hosting the tiles directly on an instance of Apache. The tiles are stored in the TMS fashion, rather than WMS. They have a custom Apache module called mod_tile which takes care of rendering queues (it’s a bit more complex than that but you get the gist).

Yes. There are planet files released on a regular basis (weekly). These are very large however. You can get extracts for many places and there are tools which work with OSM data and can produce extracts for your own specified polygon.

There are also hourly and minutely difference (diff) files released which can be applied against your database to keep the data fresh.

Why Flash? You’ll take a performance hit and the bandwidth usage will be atrocious (it will anyway, as mapserving is bandwith intensive but Flash files are typically pretty big and will cause more stress than is necessary).

OpenLayers is a JavaScript client in use on OSM.

I appreciate that you are/may be serving data as well as just map tiles however OpenLayers has vector drawing features which I expect will do what you want. Not sure exactly what features you’ll need though.

Hope this helps.