How to use OpenStreetMap/MapNik for web application

Question

I am looking into a solution for Bing Map replacement on on premise application. From this post Map rendering using OpenStreetMap and various reading, I understand that I would need to do the following:

1. download open street map OSM data
2. convert to GIS data for loading into PostgreSQL? not sure if I need to do this or not
3. load the data into database
4. use MapNik to render the map. I downloaded and run the demo, it is just generating some map in pdf/png/jpg/tif/svg format.

Now the question would be how to use this map data at my web application (ASP.NET). So when user scrolls the map, our code should just display another set of picture files there, that seems quite a lot for our application to handle. Or am I missing something here?

Answer 1

switch2osm.org already answers a lot of your questions but unfortunately you haven't really explained what you are trying to do.

If you just want to display an OSM map with a custom overlay then you neither need to download any OSM data nor you have to render anything on your own. You can just use existing tiles and create your overlay with the help of Leaflet, OpenLayers or some other library capable of displaying tiles. This is the easiest solution and can be set up within a very short time. However you have to comply with the tile usage policy of the tile provider you are choosing.

If you want to create an OSM map with a custom style, then you can either render your own tiles (which will require some rather good hardware and lots of storage) or choose one of the third-party providers who will handle the tile rendering for your.