I’m pretty new to OSM, but so far, what I have seen is very impressive.
I am a Geospatial professional in New Zealand and I would love to be able to showcase OSM through the GI community here. OSM is probably - to coin a “Calsberg” phrase, the best base map of New Zealand currently available.
The single biggest barrier I can see at the moment, is access to the current, live data in real time, direct from OSM itself.
Are there any thoughts on OSM providing a WMS and WFS service for applications to consume?
I have seen across some of the blog entries that this used to be an output - I haven’t managed to find out why it was stopped, but it would be an excellent and very valuable thing to re-start.
I appreicate that I can access the data myself via download and of course I could use tools like OSM to PostgresSQL to replicate OSM into that RDBMA and serve WMS/WFS myself, but that means that I am duplicating data and dependant upon my replication schedule, that could mean that my data is out of date when updates in my AOI occur. I’d much rather be able to consume from the source.
A WMS/WFS service would allow me to connect OSM directly into a tool such as GAIA or even ArcGIS Explorer.
There are a number of WMS services out there using OSM data already, but by using them I am one removed from OSM itself and reliant on the provider making the service available and keeping it up to date. That doesn’t necessarily provide the confidence that some individuals or organisations would need.
I’d be really interested in hearing peoples thoughts on this - I can’t be the only person out there who ca nsee the value of the services approach and just how much more accessible OSM would be if they were provided.
I have a feeling that WFS does not interest OSM folks much but I do not know why. I have been using OSM data for making WFS feature types for couple of years through the osm2pgsql - PostGIS - Geoserver chain. OSM data suits well for testing our production system because there are lots of different points, lines and polygons and whole lot of attributes for testing WFS queries and filters. And there is no need to worrry about user right management when testing with OSM data.
OSM WFS service would be a nice thing to have, it offers more alternatives than XAPI, for example reprojection on-the-fly and better possibilities for attribute filters and more spatial filters than just BBOX. And there are more data available from other WFS servers in the world. But as you said, keeping data up to date is difficult and WFS feature types need to have fixed schemas which makes it impossible to serve all the tags that people are using.
I am also from New Zealand and I fully agree with Neil’s assertion that OSM provides the best base map of my country at the moment. It is far better than the maps offered by Google. The good thing about OSM is that it is easy to operate. Anyway, as far as my knowledge goes OSM doesn’t offer WFS.
I have some demo services running but only with the Finnish data and with native projection in EPSG:3067. I have not bothered to update the data for some months now. There seems to be TinyOWS and Mapserver services up