[Talk-us] offline OSM viewers for Windows, for Police/Fire?

[Greg Troxel]

Bill Ricker <bill.n1vux at gmail.com> writes:

> On Thu, Sep 15, 2022, 07:49 Paul Johnson <baloo at ursamundi.org> wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Sep 14, 2022 at 8:16 AM Martijn van Exel <m at rtijn.org> wrote:
>>
>>> Could QGIS be sufficiently customized to fit that purpose for them? It’s
>>> pretty flexible but the needed customizations may be pretty involved.
>>>
>>
>> I seriously doubt QGIS could be dumbed down to something the average
>> American cop can handle.
>
> I was trying to find a polite way of saying this and failing.

As I see it, the point is to provide geo tools for someone who does not
have GIS/geodesy training.  And conversely, there are lots of things you
have to know to be a police officer, that most mappers have no clue
about.  So projecting out the snark, the point is to do what needs to be
done and not ask for specialist knowledge (datums and projections,
layers, geometries, etc.).

> To put it another way,  if Martijn or anyone knows of a bullet-proof
> kiosk-mode for QGIS, do tell.
>
> Could static HTML, mostly standard JavaScript libs, and geo-ref'd map
> images (exported from QGIS) for each town park (or tiles for whole town at
> scales 12-16?) provide the needed offline capability?
>   Does the ability to convert L-L to X,Y offline in JS (using
> tile/geoTIFF/... meta data) already exist in one of our slippery libs?

Sure, anything can be done.   I do not want to start writing and
maintaining an app to run on Windows, and it seems like "offline viewer"
is something many other people would want, and hence my query.

But the point that maybe this could just be a static website in file
space with leaflet is a good one, since that's less than "implementing
an app".

I should do the math to see how big z13-z19 tiles are in total.  They
could be pregenerated with a custom stylesheet that starts with carto
and adjusts a lot of things that, to put it politely, carto has
optimized for different environments, like showing if roads are dirt,
background tint on conservations parcels, and de-emphasizing tree cover
(which I find to be very often mis-mapped as people tag for the renderer
because of not having a background tint on nature_reserve).  And add in
parcel data and contours.  That actually might be reasonable.

And this could be done with vector tiles, too.



-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 194 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-us/attachments/20220915/f94362bc/attachment.sig>