I'm attending the 2009 Wikimedia developer meet-up where, amongst other things, there are people interested in getting OpenStreetMap integrated into Wikimedia-hosted wikis, hereafter referred to as Wikipedia, which is the most known incarnation of it.

Everyone in that group has been or is interested in working on making map data a first-class feature on Wikipedia, at the end of the day we had some notes about what we want to implement.

The stuff I want to work on is getting the required infrastructure in place to be able to display inline mapnik-rendered OSM maps in Wikipedia articles, once we have that working and our foot in the door it'll be very easy to add more mapping features, like finding nearby articles or doing custom renderings. But the results from today's talks (including with Brion Vibber) are to try to get the following operational:

1. Wikimedia's own updated Planet.osm mirror & importing of the Planet file into PostGIS


2. Tile rendering infrastructure, i.e. Mapnik rendering from aforementioned database


3. A program to stitch the tiles together into a single map image, something like MapOf (which appears to be t@h only) but for tiles in general (so we can stitch the mapnik tiles), maybe bigmap could be used? Maybe we could just render a custom image from Postgres itself using Mapnik like the OSM site does it instead.


4. An extension to display maps inline in MediaWiki, like Simple image extension and maybe the Slippy Map extension for JavaScript enabled browsers.

That's it basically, once these four things are completed we'll have a very simple implementation of displaying OSM data on Wikipedia, but it'll be our foot in the door to add more interesting features later on. The Wikimedia setup will be very typical of someone setting up their own OSM rendering & tile serving. We will probably have to fix up some of the software though, mainly the MediaWiki related things, for instance it appears you can't have more than one slippymap on a single page using the SlippyMap extension without it breaking.

Initially it looks like we'll be setting this up on servers Wikimedia Deutschland will be donating for the project, once the process is proven there it can be moved to the main Wikimedia sites. We might also be setting up a new mailing list specifically to coordinate this Wikimedia/OSM integration, but maybe we'll use an existing one instead.