[OSM-talk] Making an offline OpenStreetMap CD/DVD ?

[Jukka Rahkonen]

Rory McCann <rory <at> technomancy.org> writes:

> 
> Hi all,
> 
> A team has formed amoung the Ubuntu community to help make Ubuntu work
> well for NGOs (Non-Govermental Organisations, aka charities) [1] [2]. I
> myself have done some volunteer work sending ubuntu computers to Africa
> with Camara [3]. One problem with many places in the developing world is
> non-existant or poor internet bandwidth. Many people have made an
> Offline Wikipedia, Camara has done and it has been very successful.
> 
> It occured to me that having good free offline maps would also be very
> valuable, i.e. an offline OpenStreetMap.
> 
> Has anyone done this with OSM?

Hi,

I would suggest you to make a fast test with OSM derived shapefiles and GIS
program like QGis or OpenJUMP and see how close to your aim you could get by
using those. They offer moderate styling capabilities whitch may not be
extremely good for nice looking printed maps.  On the other hand they are full
featured GIS programs which can do nice things with the data. I mean things like
search by any attribute, measuring distances and areas, finding features which
are close to another feature or inside another feature, classification and
colour theming by an attribute value, support for using local aerial images and
so on.

Don't be afraid of the tags which are missing from Cloudmade or Geofabric
shapefile downloads, more tags can be added afterwards, or you can include local
database to the offline package.  Just have a look at the rendering and consider
if the quality would be good enough for the potential users.