MapOSMatic - Free Street Map Index Generation

MapOSMatic - Free Street Map Index Generation

**for France only but is hoping to expand in the near future.

Combining the OpenStreetMap mapping platform with Postgres (using PostGIS Functions) for creation of 'Bingo' grid maps with street indexes.

Example

source: http://www.maposmatic.org/smedia/chavagne.png
http://www.maposmatic.org/smedia/chavagne_index.png
(large .png's some web browsers can choke on image size being large)

This makes it very useful to print and use on your travels or to help OpenStreetMap fill in any missing or changed names - you can contribute here with over 135,000 budding OSM'ers.
Note: you don't have to have a GPS device to contribute.
Paper and Pencil works! (see http://walking-papers.org/)

How does this work? (techie stuff bit)

• Renders the map using OpenStreetMap data and the OpenStreetMap Mapnik stylesheet;
• Renders on top of the map, using Mapnik, the grid of 500 meters squares, the labels of the squares, and a few other informations on the map (copyright, scale, etc.);
• Greys out all the area outside the city if we find its administrative boundary;
• Renders an index of the streets, based on OpenStreetMap data and the intersection of the streets with the squares on the map.

"On our server, we run a PostgreSQL server, with the PostGIS extension. In this PostgreSQL server, we have loaded the full OpenStreetMap data for the metropolitan France, using the dumps from Geofabrik and the osm2pgsql tool."

This web service has been called MapOSMatic, like map-o-matic but with a reference to OpenStreetMap (OSM). The web service is written in Python using Django. It is responsible for storing the rendering requests and displaying the result of these requests. The rendering itself takes place asynchronously through the maposmaticd daemon. This daemon does only one rendering at a time, which is very important because of the CPU and I/O intensive nature of the map rendering process.

If you would like to contribute to this project then more information is available:
http://www.maposmatic.org/about/

Mapperz looks forward to it expanding across the rest Europe and the rest of the World.