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. _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
