Best way to create moving map

Question

I'm looking for a good way to create a moving map app on an semi-embedded device, comparable to a netbook. The source images are 400MB tiff files with associated world and projection files. The current approach I've taken is to create a tiled dataset for the desired zoomlevels in OSM map format. It works, but uses up way too much diskspace. Can anyone point me in the right direction here? Thanks.

Answer 1

This article includes a lot of links to free/open-source implementations of various web mapping components. Maybe you can find something in there to get you started?

Answer 2

Unfortunately, you must trade-off between performance and disk space. Tiled maps are much faster to load and don't require much RAM, but multiple versions (form of cache copies) at multiple resolutions require much disk space.

If your program runs over network, you can set up a map server, maybe using WMS protocol (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Map_Service) so your client acts as a thin client, but if your program runs offline you must work hard. The article linked by cottsak is very good

I suggest you to try different combinations of tiles resolutions and test their performance directly until you find a good trade-off.

Answer 3

You can use OpenLayers libraries for displaying your tiled maps.

To save on disk space, you can generate tiles dynamically and cache them. The cache can then be checked and old tiles deleted by a cron job if they exceed your disk quota. Check out the code in tile.php from the ka-map project. I used it a few years ago, and it worked well. ka-map