
Portable Offline Open Street Map - jharpster
http://news.spatialdev.com/portable-open-street-map/
======
just_testing
Let me explain which is the innovation of it:

There are offline OpenStreetMap clients, but there aren't ways to update said
map offilne, or to create "mini-OSM" that later can sync with the main one.

For instance, if you're doing a survey in Amazon with a local community, you
would need to make a survey, go back somewhere with internet, sync the data
with OSM, download the new file and go back to the local community.

The innovation those guys are making is to create a mini-OSM, so the village
could have its own mini-OSM, and later that mini-OSM could be synced to the
main one.

They are not the only ones trying to do that, an NGO called Digital Democracy
is also trying ([https://digital-democracy.org](https://digital-
democracy.org))

~~~
digikata
Hmm, I wonder what happens when you take a team which is heavily editing in a
village, and then multiple team members each have their individual mini-OSM of
the same village to sync back? Don't you end up needing to be able to express
edits as an OSM equivalent of patches for each edit?

~~~
maxerickson
Osm changes are already expressed as atomic changes to each version of an
object. Reasonably resolving a conflict where two different edits increment
the same version of the same object is a difficult problem (the typical way it
is currently done is reject the later edit and force manual review/fixup of
the conflict).

If someone adds a road and joins it to an existing road at existing point A,
while someone else adds a duplicate of the same physical road and joins it at
existing point B, it's going to take a rather aggressive heuristic to
automatically discard one of them.

~~~
tuxguy
Your comment reminded me of managing merge conflicts in git (or any
distributed source control system)

With conflicts, best way to resolve is a human manually deciding how to merge
(which part of commit A & which part(s) of commit B to include) :D

------
legulere
I wonder if smartphone capacities grew we would one day hit a point where most
meaningful data is already preloaded on every device: A full copy of Wikidata,
Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, dictionaries.

The trend goes the complete opposite direction: the devices get faster but we
only use it to draw the data from our servers faster. We push all our data
into the cloud, although our devices share a private network most of the time.

~~~
izacus
By the current state of the mobile world, you'd have a special Apple vetted
copy of Wikipedia with no mention of their competitors, adult themes or
anything that could remotely be percieved as offensive to anyone ;)

~~~
rmc
Except guns. Guns would be included. Because everyone follows American
culture.

~~~
JustSomeNobody
Because only guns kill:

[http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/teacher-who-
allegedl...](http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/teacher-who-allegedly-
made-up-7013166)

------
brudgers
The other night I was thinking about the potential for "mapocalypse" \--
navigation in a future where paper maps are rare because of services like
Google maps and where the network is unavailable indefinitely. Even dedicated
navigation devices are forgoing stored maps for connected services.

Over the long term, widespread access to offline maps feels like a critical
plan B. I also suspect that we're just at the beginning of a map industry not
in the mature commodity phase.

YMMV.

~~~
jgroszko
I suspect they're never going to go completely away. I still like to keep a
set in my car in case my phone is dead and can't charge it from the car for
whatever reason. I believe the Navy is adding celestial navigation back into
their curriculum in case their electronic systems are compromised. There's
still a lot of use cases where the low-tech solution is a good backup.

~~~
dokument
You mean like using a wrist watch stars to manually re-enter a space capsule?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Cooper#.22Spam_in_a_can...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Cooper#.22Spam_in_a_can.22)

------
rmc
It sounds interesting. But it will be interesting to see how they approach
"syncing" the two 'datasets' (they're own, locally modified data, and the main
OSM dataset). The current approach with the main OSM editors is to make the
mapper manually figure it out.

------
replax
one thing which would really be great is an OSM client for Kindle/ebook
readers with an offline data store. With an optimised interface and map
styling it could come in handy in many cases (hiking, bike tours - anything
where weight, power and portability are a concern).

Obviously an editor like spatialdev are developing would need more advanced
features thus they are targeting android.

~~~
rmc
You can make a regular book-of-maps for the kindle easily enough. I did it
here [http://www.kindle-maps.com/](http://www.kindle-maps.com/)

~~~
anarcat
it would be great if you would share how you did that, because there may be
other cities and countries than NYC and the UK... ;)

so far i've only used google maps PDFs but that sucks. i've also had good
experiences with offline Garmin maps based on OSM data, but that requires a
GPS with much lower battery life than a ebook reader... a bunch of providers
here:
[http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_Map_On_Garmin/Downloa...](http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_Map_On_Garmin/Download)

i used this in the past with good success:
[http://daveh.dev.openstreetmap.org/garmin/Lambertus/](http://daveh.dev.openstreetmap.org/garmin/Lambertus/)

although this seems like the newest best thing:
[http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl/](http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl/)

------
anc84
I don't understand what this is and where the "Portable Offline Open Street
Map" part is described.

There are already tons of applications for offline OSM usage. There are even
(sadly) many different vector formats and files available for download. It
would be nice to focus improvement of those instead of developing yet another
competing standard. I want to be able to use multiple apps with the same data,
not having to provide each app with its own format (looking at you, OSMAnd,
Oruxmaps, maps.me...).

~~~
detaro
I'd say it is to have a server with an offline fork, which a) provides you
access to OSM without internet (which is the "boring" part) and b) allows you
to make changes when you get new data.

When you return to somewhere with better internet, you then can sync the
changes to upstream OSM.

And all that prepackaged so it is easy to prepare and deploy to a laptop, a
small portable server, ...

~~~
beagle3
a) is "boring", but last I looked was still far from a simple installation
(tar.gz, apt-get, docker or otherwise).

On mobile now, so I can't test but if this is a simple way to start a local
read only server, it is already a significant improvement.

~~~
voltagex_
Simpler - [https://github.com/AmericanRedCross/posm-
build](https://github.com/AmericanRedCross/posm-build) seems to be based on
Ubuntu 14.04 with some extra packages. There's also a Kickstart script.

~~~
beagle3
Thanks -- that's from the original article, whose contribution describing an
easy way to set up a local OSM server is what I was applauding.

