[OSM-dev] Roadnav moving to OSM data only: some questions...

[Dustin Spicuzza]

Hey,

I am a primary developer for Roadnav, which (for those not aware) is a 
multi-platform open source GPS navigation software that has 
traditionally only used TIGER data to generate maps, and as such is very 
very USA-centric. It currently has some OSM support -- but frankly, it 
sucks and isn't usable (and I believe is out of date as well). However, 
I've been busy re-engineering Roadnav's internals over the summer to 
make a lot of much needed improvements (and continue to make more). One 
of the improvements that I'm very interested in doing is improving its 
backend to more efficiently store map data so it can be rendered quickly 
-- and part of this effort will be switching to supporting OSM data 
only, given that much of the various datasets Roadnav currently supports 
(GNIS, TIGER, etc) has been imported (and fixed!) in OSM.

So, some newbie questions (though I've read a bunch in the wiki and 
played with the API with some simple things):

Is there a C/C++ library (or plans for one) that handles accessing OSM 
data? I noticed that earlier this month there was some discussion about 
a "mobile" OSM API (which I read some of it, but not all of it) -- 
perhaps establishing a reference implementation for accessing the OSM 
data in this manner might be a reasonable idea -- theres no sense 
reinventing the wheel a million times. Of course, the network layer 
could get rather annoying here if one wanted it to be portable, but if 
there was at least a standard way to parse/store the data that would be 
useful to have.  I'd certainly be interested in helping with such a project.

Whats the best way to facilitate users downloading places by name, as 
opposed to specifying coordinates?

I noticed that the slippy maps show place names, and some show points of 
interest. How do you go about searching for these items and downloading 
them, or can they only be downloaded in the bulk downloads?

Does OSM store street number data... ie, if I wanted to find the 
coordinates for 123 Any St, does OSM support this?

Zip/postal code support?

What about city/state/country boundaries? Is there a way to 
search/download these via the API?

I have other questions too, but I've forgotten them at the moment... 
Thanks!

Dustin

-- 
Innovation is just a problem away