Technomancy

I'm trying to find a way to show OpenStreetMap data offline, so it can be used in places with little or no internet. Navit is a open source car navigation system. It runs fine as a desktop application. And they have created a binary file format for storing OpenStreetMap data. It has an advantage of creating small file sizes. This might mean it'd be possible to store the whole OpenStreetMap planet file on one CD. The XML file compressed is 6.7GB, which is too large to fit on any practical disk. I'm downloading the OpenStreetMap planet file and will convert it to Navit format to see how much space it takes.

The Navit interface is OK but isn't great. It's good if you want to look at street level, but I envision an Offline OpenStreetMap being used in an education context, which means looking at it at a country or county level. Someone on #navit suggested using Navit's binary file format and plugging it into a nicer rendering engine.