OSM Scout Server

OSM Scout server can be used as a drop-in replacement for online map services providing map tiles, search, and routing. As a result, an offline operation is possible if the device has a server and map client programs installed and running.

Among other services, the server can be used to provide:

• vector or raster tiles for other applications;
• search for locations and free text search;
• search for POIs next to a reference point or route;
• calculating routes between given sequence of points;

User's guide is available at https://rinigus.github.io/osmscout-server .

The server supports:

• map rendering via Mapnik (https://github.com/mapnik/mapnik);
• hosting of Mapbox GL vector tiles (https://github.com/mapbox/awesome-vector-tiles);
• search via Geocoder-NLP (https://github.com/rinigus/geocoder-nlp) which is based on libpostal (https://github.com/openvenues/libpostal);
• routing instructions via Valhalla (https://github.com/valhalla/valhalla);
• map rendering, search, and routing via libosmscout (http://libosmscout.sourceforge.net/).

To use the server, you have to start it and configure the client to access it. An example configurations for JavaScript-based clients are provided under "example" folder. At present, Pure Maps, uNav, and modRana include plugins already in the upstream and no additional configuration is needed.

The server is written using Qt. The server consists of a daemon and separate GUI application for Sailfish, Kirigami, Ubuntu Touch, or a QtQuick application. Installation instructions are given in INSTALL.

User feedback

There are two main communication channels with the users: GitHub discussions and Matrix channel #pure-maps:matrix.org. Matrix channel is shared with Pure Maps.

Please use Github issues to address specific problems and development requests. General discussion is expected either through corresponding issues, Matrix channel, or GitHub discussion thread.

Maps

Starting from version 0.7, the server uses maps distributed via online distribution network. It is expected that the users would download, update, and, when needed, remove maps via server's GUI/CLI. This distribution model allows users to specify which components are required (libosmscout, geocoder-nlp, for example) and download only the required components.

If tinkering is required, it is still possible to import the maps manually. However, in this case, the user is expected to incorporate the manually imported maps into configuration JSON file describing that map and use specific developer options.

Maps distribution and data

Maps are hosted by Natural Language Processing Centre (https://nlp.fi.muni.cz/en/ , Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic) through modRana (http://modrana.org) data repository. Maps are updated roughly every 2-3 months.

Map data from OpenStreetMap, Open Database License 1.0. Maps are converted to a suitable format from downloaded extracts and/or using polygons as provided by Geofabrik GmbH.

UK postal codes downloaded from https://www.freemaptools.com. These data contain: Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right 2017; Royal Mail data © Royal Mail copyright and database right 2017; National Statistics data © Crown copyright and database right 2017.

Settings

Configuration settings are in ~/.config/osmscout-server/osmscout-server.conf and this file is initialized on the first start. For Sailfish version, add prefix harbour- to the file and directory name.

In configuration file you can specify server HTTP port and the interface. In addition, map directory with several rendering options are configured. In Sailfish, map rendering options are possible to specify through GUI.

Starting from version 0.3.0, server supports up to 100 connections. The requests are processed in parallel, as much as possible, with the number of parallel threads the same as the number of CPUs. Depending on the used backend, one operation can block other operations due to the blocking of the corresponding database. Exceeding the number of supported connections would lead to dropping the connections exceeding the limit.

API and Adding support for OSM Scout Server to map clients

Exported API and what to consider while adding support for the server by a map client, see separate README.api.

Artwork

Custom icons used by the application were contributed by Fellfrosch (from talk.maemo.org).

Translations

Up to date contribution of translations are given in the About page of the application for corresponding language.

For translations, please see https://github.com/rinigus/osmscout-server/blob/master/translations/README.md

Libpostal

Please note that libpostal is developed to be used with the fine tuned model covering the World. The country-based models were developed to use libpostal in mobile devices and have not been specifically tuned. Please submit the issues with libpostal performance on country-based models to OSM Scout Server or geocoder-nlp github projects.

Acknowledgments

libpostal: https://github.com/openvenues/libpostal

valhalla: https://github.com/valhalla/valhalla

geocoder-nlp: https://github.com/rinigus/geocoder-nlp

Nominatim, Geocoder data import: https://nominatim.org

GNU Libmicrohttpd: https://www.gnu.org/software/libmicrohttpd

langcodes: https://github.com/LuminosoInsight/langcodes

Mapbox GL styles: https://github.com/rinigus/mapbox-gl-styles

Planetiler, vector tiles import: https://github.com/onthegomap/planetiler

OpenMapTiles, vector tiles schema: https://github.com/openmaptiles/openmaptiles

mapnik, rendering of raster tiles: https://github.com/mapnik/mapnik

libosmscout, used in the earlier versions as a base library: http://libosmscout.sourceforge.net

osmscout-sailfish: https://github.com/Karry/osmscout-sailfish

Hosting of maps: Natural Language Processing Centre (https://nlp.fi.muni.cz/en/ , Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic) through modRana (http://modrana.org).