I’m curious whether there is planned functionality for snapping drawn features to nodes or edges of underlying OSM data. I work for an organization that uses a lot of sketch maps, and it would be terrific to have a tool that allows non-technical staff to draw features that we (the more technical staff) can easily relate to geodata with robust topology and attributing (e.g., OSM). As it stands, we do a lot of redrawing Google MyMaps sketches so they align with features in a desktop GIS; this process is a huge waste of time. We would love to have a tool with this snapping functionality, and would probably pay for it. That said, I realize that interacting with vector tiles to accomplish this in a web environment is a pretty formidable challenge. The only application I’ve yet seen do it effectively is OSM’s iD editor.
Hi Chester,
It is quite a hard problem, and definitely needs some custom solution for this particular problem. You can either:
- Do the processing on a server and communicate with JSON. This is good when you can limit yourselves to routes for example. This open source project does something similar:
https://github.com/graphhopper/map-matching - Have full vector tile rendering in the client and implement the snapping logic there. Your candidates are MapBox GL JS, mapzen’s Tangram viewer or OpenLayers.
Unfortunately it’s out of the scope for MapHub to offer something like this, but I believe you can develop it on top of those projects.