Question

I need to build a website which needs to perform the following tasks:

1. Display a web map with topographical details
2. On the map show a set of selected streets
3. When a street is selected show a set of points of interest on that street

The constraints are:

1. Ruby on Rails
2. Everything in the stack must be open source

I’ve given an interested look at OpenStreetMap will it work for the needed tasks?

Answer 1

have a look at Mapfish or OpenLayers. OpenstreetMap will only allow you to load maps in a visualizer (think of it more like a collaborative geodatabank), and Openlayers is more or less Openstreetmap’s little brother / visualizer / tool for edition. I heard Mapfish has a plugin for rails integration, but i don’t know what it’s worth. Good luck learning the API of your choice !