2020-11-04 North American highway shields

As I mentioned earlier, I'm trying to resume work on the project of rendering North American highway banners on OpenStreetMap.

I had left off work on the project this spring, when I was starting the sprint toward retirement, trying to make sure that my work was handed off responsibly. I had also left with a tremendous sense of frustration.

The osm2pgsql tool, which I had been using (like most people who try to serve up map tiles) to populate a database for rendering, was not capable at the time of creating the tables I needed. I had written a detailed proposal of how what I needed might be accomplished. It was badly received; in fact, one of the core team of the project suggested that osm2pgsql was simply the wrong tool for the job.

I then withdrew the proposal, and began to contemplate alternative tools, but was quite discouraged at the time that it would take to retool. Given the pressures at work, I put the project on hold.

Fortunately, since then, the plan for alternative programs to populate the database has been overcome by events. Jochen Topf, unbeknownst to me, was working on a new flex back end for the program, which allows a significantly wider selection of database schemata than the original program did, and is, in fact, a superset of what I had proposed. While some post-processing will be required, it appears fit for purpose.

So, the next tasks will be (a) retool my existing database population to use that back end (testing against a small extract, most likely Connecticut or Rhode Island), and (b) expand that back end to produce the tables that I need to describe numbered highways. With any luck, I can make some progress on that stuff today.