For ages I have been intending to write a program to produce a nice guide to a town or area based on OpenStreetMap data.
I finally decided that I knew enough about postgresql and python to have a go.
The result is a program called townguide.py. The idea is that you load the openstreetmap data into a postgresql database (like you do if you want to render it using Mapnik), then produce an xml file to tell townguide.py what you want rendering. It then goes and produces the nice output for you.
Version 0.1 is working and is on SVN. At the moment it only produces html output (because that is easy), and it is not very pretty.
The next stage is to make it produce postscript to give nice printable output on a defined paper size.
An example of the html output is at http://hartlepoolmap.webhop.net.
Having looked at the output it looks like it will be quite useful from a mapping point of view - if you know the area you can review the features that are summarised and look for missing banks, supermarkets etc.
