[OSM-dev] OSM data on on-board-terminals

[Udo Giacomozzi]

Hello everybody.

I'm relatively new to OSM and I'm really excited on the amount of data
that's now available. For a long time I was thinking about developing
a in-car computer (something like a TomTom, but without routing) using
OSM data. My company is experienced in developing such devices and
some tests using bitmap tiles work very well.

However, it would be great to have realtime vector rendering instead
of raster data.

Reading through the Wiki pages I see that the OSM data is quite simple
and rendering these lines and polygons shouldn't be too difficult.

As I am talking about a stand-alone device which has all map data
inside a local memory, having a good and fast database is the key. The
rendering frontend needs to have quick access to a tiny part of the
OSM database.

OSM binary tiles come very close to this - but require a server AFAIK.

Apparently there are already many solutions done for OSM, so before
reinventing the wheel and thinking about some efficient storage engine
I'd like to ask if someone already tried to do something similar?


The renedering would be done with Gnash (a Open Source Flash player
where I wrote the software rendering part), so this could become a
truly Open Source project.


Anyway, for the moment I just want to analyze what efforts would be
necessary to create such a device.

Regards,
Udo

PS: Apologies if I choose the wrong mailing list for this question..


-- 
Udo Giacomozzi