Mapping

This page contains random thoughts and links related to mapping.

OpenLayer seems to be a pretty good Javascript map viewer. Test version is up at galosh.org.uk:81/map, and it should be relatively easy to add extra information such as repeaters and gridlines etc. Don't forget to convert projections though -- co-ordinates must be converted from lat/long to the projection used to render the map.

The real trick is offline maps. This is probably best accomplished by offline use of OpenLayer with a small web-browser, but we need tiles from somewhere. These could be rendered using mapnik and a custom set of symbolizers, but it'll take a lot of horsepower to render them all, and even more space to store them. Probably the only way though, because generation on-the-fly would still require the planet.osm file on the client machine, and PostGIS, neither of which are cool. Having said that, we'd probably need those anyway if we want to be able to search...