[GIS] Free map service for private web applications

openlayers-2postgiswfswms

Background

Looking to display a map (for internal use only) on a web page. The application must be able to add custom layers (without sending the data to the map service host):

Municipal zones (defined by shapefiles)
Custom zones (defined by polygons, possibly in terms of Municipal zones)
Site locations (defined by lat/long)
Additional city data (defined by shape files)

Because it is a private venture, it eliminates many map services, including: Google Maps, Bing, Yahoo! Maps, MapQuest, and other pay-for-use services.

Update #1

Perhaps MapQuest is a possibility.

Update #2

Requirements that I forgot to mention:

There are additional data (cities, towns, hamlets) not part of OpenStreetMap. These cities must be included without giving the data to the map provider.
There are various layers (such as employee locations) that also must be displayed, without telling the map provider where to find the data (i.e., the data will be behind a firewall).

Current Development

Currently, I have not been able to find a server that meets my requirements, so I have been following the instructions across various web sites to install a Mapnik web server:

At this point, I have various pieces of the data:

City and municipality data (shape files loaded into PostGIS)
Natural Earth data (shape files; not loaded)
Mapnik stylesheets (various files; not loaded)

GeoServer

I tried installing GeoServer (prior to Mapnik) but found the documentation to be lacking, the web-based administration tool to be cumbersome to configure, and the responsiveness on a 2 GHz machine to be painfully slow (10 seconds to render a tile with a single layer: roads), and the default aesthetic bland. (I know I can use stylesheets to liven up the presentation, but that means having to find [or create!] suitable files, install them, test them, and so forth.)

Requirements

The technical requirements include:

Cities, roadways, bodies of water (lakes, rivers, oceans)
Political boundaries (provinces, countries)
High quality (visually similar to Google Maps, MapQuest, etc.)
High uptime
900913 projection (similar to Google Maps)
Responsive tiles (under 0.1 seconds per tile)
Excellent coverage of street data for Canada
Useful for slippy map (compatible with OpenLayers)
10,000 tile requests per day
Free for commercial (or private) use, or less than $2000 per year?

Good Example

Here is an excellent example (OpenLayers) of what I'm looking to achieve:

Bad Examples

An example of what I'm not looking to achieve:

An example of incomplete data:

Question

What WMS, WMTS, or WFS servers offer the required functionality?

Best Answer

I'm not sure why you are excluding services like Google Maps, especially since your expected traffic not that high (Google starts charging after 25,000 map views (your map views will be much lower than 10,000): https://developers.google.com/maps/faq#usage_pricing). What you basically need is two things:

Someone to provide you with the Web slippy map. This can be Google Maps, Bing, MapQuest, Cloudmade etc. Or you could run your own tile server and use OpenStreetMap data.
Rendering your own vector data on the client side (using javascript) on top of the Web map. There are several open source libraries that can do that (OpenLayers, Leaflet, Polymaps...).

Some pointers to investigate further:

Introduction

This will likely require significant amount of manually work to detect and remove the duplicated data. When you're detecting and resolving the duplicate data; you'll want both sources to be in the same geo format: shapefile, PostGIS DBs, or as OSM data.

Workflow

The following workflow is based on having both sources of data as OSM before merging and resolving duplicate data.

There's a couple options to convert the data into OSM:

Convert the shapefile data into OSM however you'd like. Versions of ogr2ogr released in 2013 or later (version 1.10 or later, IIRC) can also convert SHP to OSM. There's also ogr2osm as you had noted: there's a couple different versions of ogr2osm, no matter which one you use - I prefer pnorman's, it's the most up-to-date. No matter what, make sure the translation files are compatible with the version of ogr2osm that you're using (for the sake of simplicity, the ones that I've linked to should be compatible with the version of ogr2osm). See here as examples for translation files that are compatible with pnorman's ogr2osm.

Ensure the translation file is complete with of all the information that you want in your shapefile. The translation file will convert your Types and attributes of the shapefile into what OSM calls Tags, which consist of Keys and Values.

1a. run ogr2osm.

Open josm, download the conflation plugin
Your gov data is now a osm file. Open josm, File > open Your data is there as a layer.
If you already have the OSM data locally stored on your computer, open it in josm, it will also open as a new layer.
Merging these two sources of data together and resolving the duplicate data is known as conflation. Run the conflation plugin and resolve all of the conflicts.

If JOSM runs out of memory (e.g., when using large files), separate the types of attributes and complete this workflow multiple times, each with a different kind of data (e.g. boundaries and land uses; highways; buildings), and then finally merge the osm files together using osmium or another tool.

B. JOSM can also read shapefiles although SHP support isn't perfect and this method assumes the shapefile can be loaded entirely into memory...

Start JOSM.
Open the shapefile (e.g., filename.shp).
Select all.
In JOSM, Edit the attributes and properties that were imported from the SHP, and change them so each attribute corresponding an OSM tag.
Save as OSM format.
Continue from A4 and conflate

Import as OSM

Import the OpenStreetMap data into the system as follows:

Change to the directory containing OpenStreetMap (OSM) files converted using JOSM.
Execute the following commands in the database:

    CREATE EXTENSION hstore;
    osm2pgsql -j -W \
              -d osm filename.osm

The -j option is key as it instructions osm2pgsql to import the tags into an hstore column, this preserving the underlying data structure and will import all tags into the database.

Create Mapnik Layer

To have the data appear on the map, add a layer and a style for that layer. This can be as simple as the following:

Edit mapnik-stylesheets/osm.xml.
Insert the following XML code before the closing </Map> tag...

...

<Layer name="prefix_zone" status="on" srs="&osm2pgsql_projection;">
  <StyleName>zones</StyleName>
  <Datasource>
    <Parameter name="table">
    (select way from prefix_line order by tags desc, z_order) as zones
    </Parameter>
    &datasource-settings;
  </Datasource>
</Layer>

Create Mapnik Style

Continuing from the previous section:

Find the last </Style> tag (around line 3350).
Insert the following XML code before the &layer-shapefiles; directive:

...

<Style name="zones">
  <Rule>
    &maxscale_zoom1;
    &minscale_zoom19;
    <LineSymbolizer stroke="#0065BD" stroke-width="2.5" />
  </Rule>
</Style>

Roadmatcher

roadmatcher is another tool that might be helpful

[GIS] Free map service for private web applications

Background

Update #1

Update #2

Current Development

GeoServer

Requirements

Good Example

Bad Examples

Related Links

Question

Best Answer

Related Question

Background

Update #1

Update #2

Current Development

GeoServer

Requirements

Good Example

Bad Examples

Related Links

Question

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[GIS] tile cache error : Lower left corner is outside layer bounds

[GIS] Conflate (merge) private shapefile data with OSM data

Introduction

Workflow

Import as OSM

Create Mapnik Layer

Create Mapnik Style

Roadmatcher

Related Question