Calligra/Ideas/Open Street Map Integration

Talked with Jörg Ostertag <openstreetmap At ostertag.name> about open street map.

The idea I had is that KOffice shows a map and allows people to navigate and after doing so we will downlooad data from the open streetmap server to include in the KOffice document in a vector format.

OSM has a couple of ways that their data is used. It has a live data server that has a webserver service API that allows you to fetch the internal data format. (.osm IIRC) Second there is a server that uses a weekly snapshot with pre-processed data (postgis) that is inserted into a database and which is used for the website.

The following setup has been suggested as a first version;

The user using KOffice selects a rectangle somewhere on earth that he wants the map data for. (i.e. use Marble)
The KOffice plugin connects to the live data servers webservice to request the data for that area. As the webservice currently has a size limit of 0.3 degrees (some 48km) we might want to do several requests.
We get an xslt from OSM that we use to convert the data fetched in the previous step into svg.

We can then simply load that svg into a new vector shape.

Future feature requests

provide the xslt via a webservice as well. (preferably allowing a 'HEAD' like request to check if we are up to data).
Provide a new service based on a filtered database of the data so the non-visual things are not sent to the client.
Provide a way to remove detail on the OSM server based on a webservice property.
Check and/or fix that the xslt is capable of setting a DPI which is used for the size of the fonts used in the svg.