[Lorodux-dev] New Member

[Paul Kelly]

Lulu-Ann at gmx.de wrote:
> Hello List,
> 
> we have a new member here on the mailing list,
> welcome Paul.
> 
> Paul, can you introduce yourself, please?

Hi,
I introduced myself on the Accessibility mailing list a long time ago 
(<http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/accessibility/2009-July/000003.html>) 
and have been lurking there and on the blindennavigation list ever 
since (I can read German OK but don't speak it so well). At that time 
I didn't have any time to study OpenStreetMap in depth but have had 
more time since. I'm pleased to say I did my first edits last week 
(added a couple of roads and some missing street names in my area).

I am interested in efficient ways of transferring the OSM vector data 
to mobile devices in vector format and am currently studying the 
standard OpenStreetMap API v0.6 XML format 
(<http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Xapi>) and also the OSM Mobile 
Binary Protocol 
(<http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_Mobile_Binary_Protocol>). I 
have already written a program in C to connect to the XAPI server, 
download and parse the XML map for a specified area. I hope to also 
write a program in C to do the same for the OSM Mobile Binary 
Protocol, and perhaps if I get time a nice goal to aim for would be to 
write a server program in C that can parse the OSM planet XML file, 
convert it to an efficient in-memory format and serve requests to 
mobile clients using the OSM Mobile Binary protocol. But that is some 
time away yet! In general the large use of scripting languages such as 
Ruby and PHP for server-side OSM stuff has surprised me, and I think 
there could be large efficiency gains to be achieved by writing native 
code and using more efficient transfer formats.

I feel in the world in general there is too much focus on using 
pre-rendered raster maps for mobile navigation, when transferring the 
map data to the mobile device in vector format gives so many more 
possibilities for perceptualisation - LoroDux being an excellent 
example of this.

I installed LoroDux on a Nokia 5230 Symbian phone last week and was 
quite impressed with the simple but useful functionality. I found a 
bug whereby the phone hangs and I have to take the battery out to 
reset it, when I try to query Wo bin ich? / Where am I?. So I thought 
when I have time I might look into the Java code for some ideas how to 
fix that and offer a patch. I'm not a Java programmer (as I said in 
the other e-mail, my expertise is in C), but I'm willing to have a go. 
I'm not ready to do that yet, but when I saw the announcement about 
this list I just thought I would join it so I can keep up to date with 
what is happening with LoroDux and be ready to contribute when I have 
the time.

Best regards

Paul

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Paul D Kelly
Intelligent Systems and Control Research Group
Electrical & Electronic Engineering
The Queen's University of Belfast
Ashby Building, Stranmillis Road
Belfast BT9 5AH
N. Ireland

E-mail: Paul.Kelly at ee.qub.ac.uk
WWW: http://www.ee.qub.ac.uk/isac/

Tel.: 9097 4075 (within N. Ireland)
Dialling Prefixes GB (028), ROI (048), Intl. (+44 28)
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