[GIS] Can OpenStreetMap replace Google Earth

google earthopenstreetmap

I need to build a website which needs to perform the following tasks:

Display a web map with topographical details
On the map show a set of selected streets
When a street is selected show a set of points of interest on that street

The constraints are:

Ruby on Rails as a programming language
Everything in the stack must be open source

I've given an interested look at OpenStreetMap will it work for the needed tasks?

EDIT

Actually there is a product using Google Earth in this company but they want to change it due to its commercial cost.

Best Answer

If you don't need satellite imagery or 3D stuff it's possible with a combination of:

OSM data imported in Postgresql/Postgis (via osm2pgsql)
Mapnik used to render map tiles
OpenLayers used to display the web map (serving tiles rendered by Mapnik)
some Javascript middleware (ExtJS) to facilitate retrieving data as required by vector layers and build UI components
some server side component (Ruby on Rails based if required) that queries the Postgis/Postgresql database for features (i.e. geometry of selected streets, nearby POIs).

We have an application built on top of the above at gis.modulo.ro that shows mountain hiking trails from OpenStreetMap (server side is Java based).

Note: You can do some 3D stuff by integrating altitude profiles (NASA srtm) with the OpenStreetMap data.

Related Solutions

[GIS] Assessing OpenStreetMap coverage for international routing

There's no statistics on routing quality in different countries available, as far as I'm aware. The best thing you can do is try to measure things indirectly.

I organised a project to do this in the USA on OpenStreetMap during 2009. For full details see the 250 cities project on the OpenStreetMap wiki

First we measured how many of the 250 largest cities in the country were routable, in a large matrix of every possible start/finish point. Secondly, we found places where the outward/backward routes were significantly different lenghts. Then we looked at routes where the distance was greater than 1.4x of the great-circle route, as an indication of likely routing problems.

You could use a similar approach to estimate routing quality in your countries of interest. Your assumption that major cities and major roads are mapped first generally holds true for OpenStreetMap, in my experience.

[GIS] Differences between OSM data and MapQuest OSM data

I did:

curl 'http://api.openstreetmap.org/api/0.6/map/?bbox=-58.38,-34.62,-58.37,-34.61'

and saw one entry that had an address and mentioned MapQuest:

<node id="1184735456" lat="-34.6123820" lon="-58.3719110" user="Polyglot" uid="15188" visible="true" version="1" changeset="7448622" timestamp="2011-03-03T19:11:11Z">
<tag k="addr:city" v="Buenos Aires"/>
<tag k="addr:country" v="AR"/>
<tag k="addr:housenumber" v="390"/>
<tag k="addr:street" v="Defensa"/>
<tag k="name" v="Deybel Catering"/>
<tag k="shop" v="catering"/>
<tag k="source" v="mapquest_critical_addresses"/>
</node>

Is this the sort of thing you're seeing? If not, could you provide an example? I'm pretty sure the OSM home page doesn't let you search by street number, though I realize you weren't using that.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[GIS] Assessing OpenStreetMap coverage for international routing

[GIS] Differences between OSM data and MapQuest OSM data

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