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

[Mikel Maron]

This kind of use is exactly what I was thinking about in my talk at State of the Map, on OSM in disaster response.

I don't think this would be that hard to do directly in Rails. A configuration variable identifies the install as temporary, local, offline. It could pull data directly from the API or a planet file. Add another table to keep track of dates and statistics relevant to syncing. Big red button on a new admin panel syncs the local db with the main. 

There's some issues there of course -- conflicts mainly. But if this is intended for use in remote areas, then edit conflicts are unlikely anyway.

-Mikel

----- Original Message ----
From: Richard Fairhurst <richard at systemeD.net>
To: Talk Openstreetmap <talk at openstreetmap.org>
Sent: Friday, October 19, 2007 6:29:26 PM
Subject: Re: [OSM-talk] Off line OSM editing application with scrolling map for use in remote areas


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

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