[OSM-talk] Off line OSM editing application with scrolling map for use in remote areas

[Richard Fairhurst]

Robert (Jamie) Munro wrote:

> I don't know how difficult this would be to impliment, but a good
> solution to this may be to allow JOSM to work with some sort of  
> database
> backend, rather than in-memory java objects. The idea would then be  
> that
> you can load a whole planet file (or at least the whole UK) into JOSM,
> and it not become intolerably slow.

Well, you could theoretically put the Rails port on a laptop;  
populate it with (part of) planet.osm; configure JOSM to talk to  
localhost/api/0.5/ (or use Potlatch); and work from there.

When you got back home, you'd need a script to pull your newly  
created data out of the database (say, anything with a timestamp  
after the date of the planet.osm), reset any IDs to negative numbers  
to avoid conflicts, and save as an .osm file ready for upload. That's  
probably about 50 lines of Perl and SQL, though you could get clever  
with conflict resolution if you wanted to.

In days of yore, Nigel Magnay wrote a lightweight OSM server (in  
Java) that removed the need for a full OSM install. I don't think it  
was ever fully 0.3 complaint, let alone 0.4 or 0.5, but it may be  
worth resuscitating:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Osm2go

cheers
Richard