On December 11, 2004, Steve Coast announced that the first street had been entered into OpenStreetMap.
“Hi all,
A fair amount of work has gone in to the backend and the applet to allow logging in, the deletion of points and the ability to load and add streets. The first street was entered today (well yesterday really) and the associated gps tracks behind deleted (well, versioned in to history). You can see it by taking a look at openstreetmap.org.
From here it is fairly trivial to add street data such as pedestrian/car/bicycle access, point of interest data and so on as its merely an extension of the current database tables. Polygon information such as parks or bodies of water is slightly more complicated.
The UI is fairly terrible, but that isn’t difficult to fix once I’ve
added a few more features and figured out a good way of laying things out.
The applet is a lot faster when it isn’t downloading 10,000 points of gps track data. I envisage splitting between two things now.
1/ a static viewer so people can browse .gif tiles. What this will be written in I don’t know. Maybe mapserver. Associated with this will be an opening search interface a-la streetmap.co.uk to allow you to enter street name / postcode / lat,lon and go to it
2/ the applet for editing from an ‘edit this’ type link on the .gif tile browser thing. a-la a wiki Off the wiki is now FeatureRequests. I can think of about a million things off the top of my head to add, not least of which would be a
continuous and stable gpx writer for use with laptop-in-a-backpack, and an up/downloader. That’ll be there until I get bugzilla up, but I’m leaning toward using one on sf.net or something to save hassle.
Oh and I need to write an account generation page. Comments?
Have fun,
SteveC”
