Minimal support for serving base-maps

[Ben Wyss]

using OSM or gadam data we need to make some simple base maps layers: country borders and country lables (admin 0 and 1), water, landmass.
These layers should be rendered as mbtiles and served with tilestream.

please see: http://openstreetmapdata.com/data for osm land, water and coastline data

 and

http://mapbox.com/tilemill/docs/guides/osm-bright-mac-quickstart/

[Ben Wyss (bmwyss)]

Further investigation of support base-map artifacts:

Creating custom base map(s) is becoming easier as OSM data becomes more complete and with new tools like tilemill, MapBox & tilestream. However creating maintaining and serving ones own global base map is costly. First one needs to download the raw OSM data and extrapolate from it. here are a few links:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Planet.osm
http://download.geofabrik.de/

Some folks have already done the dirty work, and provide landmass, water and coastlines available for download:

http://openstreetmapdata.com/data

However, as switch2oam note, serving your own maps is a fairly intensive task. Depending on the size and detail of the area you’re interested in serving and the traffic you expect the system requirements will vary. In general, requirements will range from 10-20GB of storage, 4GB of memory, and a modern dual-core processor for a city-sized region to 300GB+ of fast storage, 24GB of memory, and a quad-core processor for the entire planet... http://switch2osm.org/serving-tiles/

Another approach is to use free existing base maps such as the ones found here: https://tiles.mapbox.com/mapbox/ and then build custom layers on top of these.

[Ben Wyss (bmwyss)]

I made this base map using some extrapolated OSM data (see above) (landmass, water & coastlines), it is global and from zoom 1 to 9, and took about 24hr to compile on hope. http://193.206.66.82:8000/#!/map/world_landmass

[Ben Wyss (bmwyss)]

github: https://github.com/gem/oq-platform/pull/24