[Xastir] Announcing tile support for OSM

[Brett Friermood]

I looked through the usage policy that Jerry linked to, and see the
restrictions we're working under.

Knowing that, though, I have a couple thoughts. It mentions bulk
downloading levels 17 and 18 are forbidden without consulting with
the system admin beforehand, and also to discuss requirements
with the system admins to not have access blocked. Not knowing
for sure, maybe they are actually OK with bulk downloading as long
as they know?

Maybe the requirements for use in Xastir could be discussed directly
with the admins. This seems more like a "two year old saying I'm more
special than you" way of doing things, though. Not the best way to do it
since the resources would still be the same, limited, only we would be
hogging more of them.

On the other hand, for heavy users it does mention running your own
tile server. This seems like a viable solution. I didn't really look closely
at how that really works, but if some one was running one, then Xastir
could connect to that instead of the OSM servers.

I had another thought that maybe a single server could be allowed to
bulk download the tiles, then serve them to Xastir users. This server
could check for and get the most updated tiles from the "real" tile servers.
Then all of us could do the same using this server which would take all
the load off the OSM servers.

It's late, so maybe I'm way off here, but it's a thought. I'm sure something
could be figured out.

Brett
KC9MWG



On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 7:06 PM, Jerry Dunmire <jerry at dunmire.org> wrote:
> Brett and Curt,
> The only problem is that bulk downloads are strongly discouraged, and
> expressly prohibited for some zoom levels, by
> the OSM tile servers. See the policy at
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tile_usage_policy
>
> Of course other tile servers may have different policies, and I know
> of at least one
> program that appears to violate the policy.
>
> Not that I would ever suggest anyone should violate the policy, but I
> would hope that if they
> did they would not use the XASTIR user-agent setting.
>
> ...jerry
>
>
> On Wed, Jul 28, 2010 at 4:46 PM, Curt, WE7U <curt.we7u at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, 28 Jul 2010, Brett Friermood wrote:
>>
>>> I am wondering, though, if there is a way to download a large area
>>> of tiles explicitly for offline use?
>>
>> I just thought of a sneaky way:  Write a Perl or Python script which
>> uses xastir_udp_client to send packets into Xastir.  Set up Xastir
>> to track the object.  Have the object run along the map in a zig-zag
>> pattern across the area of interest.  Repeat at each zoom level
>> you're interested in.  That will force caching of the tiles of
>> interest.  Yea, you can tell I lost too much sleep last night
>> playing with code...
>>
>> Of course it would be easier/more efficient to write a block of code
>> for Xastir to just snag the tiles over a region and between two zoom
>> levels.  Or a separate outside program to do the same and then force
>> Xastir to think it cached them.
>>
>> --
>> Curt, WE7U.                         <http://www.eskimo.com/~archer>
>>   APRS:  Where it's at!                    <http://www.xastir.org>
>>  Lotto:  A tax on people who are bad at math. - unknown
>> Windows:  Microsoft's tax on computer illiterates. - WE7U.
>> The world DOES revolve around me:  I picked the coordinate system!"
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