Free to implement?

[Mathew Brown]

Hi there,

Very cool site! I'd like to setup this up for my home city. Just to be clear, this is open source and I am able to use it and modify it to my liking? I have a similar website but this one already has many of the features that I was planning on implementing, so I'm hoping to just switch to using OTM. 

Cheers

Mat

[Andrew Thompson]

Hello Mat,

Correct, the core OpenTreeMap is open source under the GPLv3 license. For those who would like more features or are uncomfortable diving into the code to set up OTM on their own, we offer a cloud subscription service as well.

Also, we would of course welcome you to submit any contributions or modifications you make as pull requests back to the project!

What city are you in? And what is the similar website you're running already? Let us know if you have any questions as you work to make the transition.

Thanks,

Andrew

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[Mathew Brown]

Hi Andrew,

Very cool. Great installations instructions, by the way. I’m in Toronto and recently setup up site urbantrees.ca, which currently just maps the trees in the city’s database, of which there are about 600,000 of them. I use Geoserver to server trees so I’m interested in looking into your code to see how you guys do that. I’d love to start by loading the city’s trees into the OTM database. A lot of the trees and details are incorrect so I’d like users to be able to edit them - which your site allows. A lot of the features I wanted to add are already in OTM, which is why I’d like to use your site.

Cheers,

Mat

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[Andrew Thompson]

Hi Mat,

That sounds great. Actually, we used to use Geoserver (with TileCache) in the first version of OTM ("OTM1"). With OTM2, we've moved to a fork of CartoDB's Windshaft map tiler (in the repo OpenTreeMap/otm2-tiler), which is written in Node.js.

Since you're in Toronto, have you by any chance heard of http://trees.jordanteichmann.ca/ ? I found that site a while ago and it looks like he did something similar with Toronto street tree data. Could be a potential collaborator in your city!

-Andrew

[Mathew Brown]

Actually I have. We've spoke via reddit (where I posted a link to my site). I've let him know about OTM.

[Mathew Brown]

Have you guys implemented any thing to import the trees on Open Street Map? There are quite added for Toronto that I'd like to load into the database. 

[Robert Cheetham]

Mat,

It's a really great idea.  There is the potential to do this, but for many efforts, the OpenStreetMap license (ODBL) would require that all additions or changes be contributed back to OpenStreetMap under the same license.  For many cities, this means that they can contribute their original data to OSM (as NYC, Chicago and others have done) without losing ownership rights, but they cannot accept changes back from OSM.  Or at least this is the prevailing interpretation of the ODBL - it's a new-ish license, and there is also some uncertainty.  Since many of the users of OpenTreeMap are cities or non-profits associated with cities and they want to retain ownership of their data, we haven't had any demand for implementing a feature like this, and we do not have any plans to implement it to support the cloud version of OpenTreeMap.

That said, the OpenTreeMap API would enable such a tool to be developed, and it could potentially be a valuable contribution for projects where the OpenStreetMap license is not an issue.

Best,

Robert

------------------
Robert Cheetham

Azavea  |  340 N 12th St, Ste 402, Philadelphia, PA

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[Mathew Brown]

Thanks for the response Robert. I'll think about I'll think about if that is something I want to tackle. It would be nice to include them..

[Johnson Chetty]

On Wednesday, September 10, 2014 12:55:58 AM UTC+5:30, Robert Cheetham wrote:

Mat,

It's a really great idea.  There is the potential to do this, but for many efforts, the OpenStreetMap license (ODBL) would require that all additions or changes be contributed back to OpenStreetMap under the same license.  For many cities, this means that they can contribute their original data to OSM (as NYC, Chicago and others have done) without losing ownership rights, but they cannot accept changes back from OSM.  Or at least this is the prevailing interpretation of the ODBL - it's a new-ish license, and there is also some uncertainty.  Since many of the users of OpenTreeMap are cities or non-profits associated with cities and they want to retain ownership of their data, we haven't had any demand for implementing a feature like this, and we do not have any plans to implement it to support the cloud version of OpenTreeMap.

That said, the OpenTreeMap API would enable such a tool to be developed, and it could potentially be a valuable contribution for projects where the OpenStreetMap license is not an issue.

 

Hello, wonderful people! Good to see y'all! :)

Would like to develop this part of the code! We love OSM, its also community driven and hosts a wealth of information that provide indispensable information about tree health and type depending on surroundings. 

It's goals align so much with OTM, I think this should help in bridging that gap somewhere. 

That being said, would like to know where and how to start. 

Some reading pointers and guidance would be much appreciated.

[Robert Cheetham]

Johnson,

Thanks for offering to develop some code to implement an OSM import.  I continue to think this is a great idea, and an "OSM Connector" would a real contribution.  A few things to consider:

Approaches

There are at least a couple of potential approaches:

 -> Bulk Importer - we are in the process of developing a bulk import feature for OpenTreeMap, and we expect this to be completed and committed to the GitHub repo in the next few weeks.  One simple solution would be export the OSM data, convert to a CSV file and then import using the bulk importer.  There will be some limitations in this initial version of the importer - you'll need to adhere to a fixed set of field names - there won't be a feature for matching arbitrary field names to the OpenTreeMap database, but that's probably easy to overcome.  And this initial version is not very fast yet.  If you wanted to help smooth the way for OSM imports, you could potentially build a tool that would convert the standard set of OSM tree tags to OpenTreeMap field names.

 -> API - the OpenTreeMap project exposes an API that supports all core functionality.  Another approach would be to develop an import tool that would support transferring data from OSM to OpenTreeMap by implementing software that would bridge the two APIs.  The most significant challenge in taking this approach is that we haven't done the work to document the OpenTreeMap API.  We use the API extensively to support the native iOS and Android clients, so it's well-tested, but not well-document.   We'd like to see the documentation completed, but we haven't had a lot of demand, so it's been low on our priority list.  Still, there's probably only a small amount of the API that you'd need, and it might not be too tough to use it to pull off development of an OSM Connector.

Potential Issues

 -> Fields vs. Tags - OSM has a very flexible data model - any tag is possible - while OpenTreeMap is based on a relational database.  The OpenTreeMap data model is flexible and can accommodate many custom fields, but you would likely need to make some decisions about which tags you want to import and if they are not part of the standard OpenTreeMap list, you'd have to set up custom fields in your instance

 -> Standard OSM Tree Tags - The accepted OSM tags for trees -  http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:natural%3Dtree - are fairly limited but despite the short list, they only partially match the standard set in OpenTreeMap.  There is support in OpenTreeMap for species, species:en and circumference (would need to be converted to diameter at breast height [DBH]), but you'd likely need to set custom fields for other tags, like leaf-type, taxon. or sex.

 -> Units - OSM assumes meters as the default; you'd likely need to query the OpenTreeMap instance to check the units to be sure they match.

If you are interested in developing a new tool, the first step will likely be to go through the installation process outlined in the OTM2 wiki at https://github.com/OpenTreeMap/OTM2/wiki and get the system up and running.  Then I'd suggest putting together some notes on the approach you'd like to take and share with the mailing list to get feedback.

Best,

Robert

------------------
Robert Cheetham

Azavea  |  340 N 12th St, Ste 402, Philadelphia, PA
chee...@azavea.com  | T 215.701.7713 

Web azavea.com  |  Blog azavea.com/blogs  |  Twitter @rcheetham  and @azavea

Azavea is a B Corporation - we apply geospatial technology for civic and social impact

while advancing the state-of-the-art through research. Join us.

On Fri, Dec 26, 2014 at 11:27 PM, Johnson Chetty <johnso...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wednesday, September 10, 2014 12:55:58 AM UTC+5:30, Robert Cheetham wrote:

Mat,

It's a really great idea.  There is the potential to do this, but for many efforts, the OpenStreetMap license (ODBL) would require that all additions or changes be contributed back to OpenStreetMap under the same license.  For many cities, this means that they can contribute their original data to OSM (as NYC, Chicago and others have done) without losing ownership rights, but they cannot accept changes back from OSM.  Or at least this is the prevailing interpretation of the ODBL - it's a new-ish license, and there is also some uncertainty.  Since many of the users of OpenTreeMap are cities or non-profits associated with cities and they want to retain ownership of their data, we haven't had any demand for implementing a feature like this, and we do not have any plans to implement it to support the cloud version of OpenTreeMap.

That said, the OpenTreeMap API would enable such a tool to be developed, and it could potentially be a valuable contribution for projects where the OpenStreetMap license is not an issue.

 

Hello, wonderful people! Good to see y'all! :)

Would like to develop this part of the code! We love OSM, its also community driven and hosts a wealth of information that provide indispensable information about tree health and type depending on surroundings. 

It's goals align so much with OTM, I think this should help in bridging that gap somewhere. 

That being said, would like to know where and how to start. 

Some reading pointers and guidance would be much appreciated.