Hey, I am a primary developer for Roadnav, which (for those not aware) is a multi-platform open source GPS navigation software that has traditionally only used TIGER data to generate maps, and as such is very very USA-centric. It currently has some OSM support -- but frankly, it sucks and isn't usable (and I believe is out of date as well). However, I've been busy re-engineering Roadnav's internals over the summer to make a lot of much needed improvements (and continue to make more). One of the improvements that I'm very interested in doing is improving its backend to more efficiently store map data so it can be rendered quickly -- and part of this effort will be switching to supporting OSM data only, given that much of the various datasets Roadnav currently supports (GNIS, TIGER, etc) has been imported (and fixed!) in OSM.
So, some newbie questions (though I've read a bunch in the wiki and played with the API with some simple things): Is there a C/C++ library (or plans for one) that handles accessing OSM data? I noticed that earlier this month there was some discussion about a "mobile" OSM API (which I read some of it, but not all of it) -- perhaps establishing a reference implementation for accessing the OSM data in this manner might be a reasonable idea -- theres no sense reinventing the wheel a million times. Of course, the network layer could get rather annoying here if one wanted it to be portable, but if there was at least a standard way to parse/store the data that would be useful to have. I'd certainly be interested in helping with such a project. Whats the best way to facilitate users downloading places by name, as opposed to specifying coordinates? I noticed that the slippy maps show place names, and some show points of interest. How do you go about searching for these items and downloading them, or can they only be downloaded in the bulk downloads? Does OSM store street number data... ie, if I wanted to find the coordinates for 123 Any St, does OSM support this? Zip/postal code support? What about city/state/country boundaries? Is there a way to search/download these via the API? I have other questions too, but I've forgotten them at the moment... Thanks! Dustin -- Innovation is just a problem away _______________________________________________ dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
