[OSM-talk] Is there a OSM map viewer program to dynamically view OSM data?

[Nicolás Alvarez]

2016-01-07 23:58 GMT-03:00 Wuzzy <wuzzy2 at mail.ru>:
> Hi!
>
> I was wondering if there is some standalone application (preferable for
> PC) to view OSM data as a map, but dynamically and locally (not
> from some random computer on the Internet) rendered.
>
> We already have a large number of websites which show OSM data in all
> sorts of different styles and this is pretty cool. But I think all of
> them do not show OSM in its full glory, and they are all tailored to
> a specific use case.
> The www.openstreetmap.org style is already pretty nice IMO but this is
> of course not useful for all use cases.
>
> Also most of the websites them use a pre-rendered “base layer” and just
> put symbols on top of that. This is not what I want.
> Therefore, the KDE program “Marble” does not count. It is able to show
> OSM, but it's just the pre-rendered default layers of
> www.openstreetmap.org.
> JOSM kinda does what I want, but it is obviously not tailored towards
> *viewing* map data for everyday usage.
>
> What I want is an application which renders OSM data directly and based
> on configurable user settings, i.e. switching on and off certain
> features (like country borders) is as simple as clicking a checkbox.
>
> As an analogy, Google Earth has such a feature where you can toggle
> some map features, but it is not based on OSM, obviously and also it is
> rather limited in that sense.
>
> So I wonder, is there already such a tool which has such features? Or
> at least a *similar* tool. It would be very cool if the tool can render
> from OSM data directly, but if some manual conversion would be needed,
> that would be okay.
>
> I should give some examples:
> The program could have a checkbox somewhere to toggle country borders.
> So you click the checkbox and they disappear. Or you could have a map
> where only lanterns or whatever are displayed. Or a map where only the
> surface or landuse types are rendered. Etc. etc. Everything should be
> created dynamically.
>
> The reason why I am looking for such a tool is because I think it would
> be really useful in many aspects.
>
> In case no such program exists, I wonder if there has been made any
> attempt to create such a program (at least).

What do you really mean with "directly"? Would your app fetch raw data
from the OpenStreetMap API like JOSM does? That can't possibly work;
the database, API, and data format are not designed for that. If you
were zoomed out enough to see a whole country, it would have to
download *all* of the data for the country (hundreds of megabytes).
Make your "direct" app see all of spain and wait for a 533 MB download
(which would take the server significant resources and time to
generate and compress) before anything appears...

What you can do is create vector tiles from the openstreetmap data,
with reduced detail at reduced zooms, etc. for example only having
borders and no streets or points of interest when you're looking at
entire countries, and then render *that* with whatever style. But no
matter what, you have to put *some* styling decisions on the
generation of the vector tiles, mainly what data may be visible at
what zooms, eg. to stop residential streets from being on the z2
tiles.

-- 
Nicolás