[OSGeo-Discuss] offline maps

P Kishor punk.kish at gmail.com
Tue Nov 9 10:15:57 PST 2010


On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 11:33 AM, carlos sousa <springaleek at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello Ian and Kishor,
>
> It's strange you refer to google's TOS, which kinda reminds me of
> microsofts agreements on the stickers of original software, you have
> to buy but is never yours.


Nothing strange about it. It has always been that way. Its just that
there is more awareness of these issues. Almost all copyrightable
material is never really yours, and when it is, there are limitations
on what you can do with it. Even in the physical realm (atoms not
bits) you can resell a book or a CD that you purchased, but you can't
make a 1000 copies of it and resell all of those.

In the digital realm (bits not atoms), you almost always pay for a
license to use the "thing" not to own it.

On top of that, stuff like EULA and TOS are contracts between you and
the vendor/provider that you become party to soon as you click on that
button or check that checkbox ("I didn't read the long boring stuff"
is not a good defense).


> To run around with the data in your cache isn't illegal? Anyways, I
> was wondering about other kinds of data freely available on the net,
> like yahoo's, usgs, nasa, etc.

Even if stuff is "freely available on the net" doesn't mean that it is
free. There are limits to what you can do with it, and those limits
are spelled out in the terms of service (or equivalent agreement).

I am pretty sure that Google prohibits offline caching of their data.

> Aerial photographs that lie around the net are scarce but theres a
> large repository of ground based and altitude information that I don't
> know how to use and Kishor's solution is really cool but out of the
> reach of the non scientific realm, and for you average geek.

It is not that difficult actually. Should you decide to do it, there
is enough help available from the user community. That is the very
nature of open source. You have to roll your sleeves and do some
lifting, sometimes heavy, sometimes light, but always have to do some
lifting.


> Regarding geoserver, it's that easy to roll out tiff's at it because I
> have several free tif's and other generated from gdal's merge feature
> that he simply refuses to serve as wms.
> By the way I do use opengeo's and gisvm's solution for single laptop
> access to wms served data.

There you go. You already have a solution. Just learn more about it
and use it to the fullest.


> Another problem is that there are alot of images that aren't georenferenced.

Yes, that is another problem.

>
> Thanks for sharing your ideas.
>
> Carlos
>
> On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 5:08 PM, Ian Turton <ijturton at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 11:59 AM, carlos sousa <springaleek at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Hello and thanks for your help, but thats kinda blunt, throw
>>> everything into the laptop and call it bigfatmaprepository. Is it
>>> possible to detail a bit the software used and what kind of rasters
>>> there are in the repository.
>>>
>>
>> Install GeoServer and GWC and add all your data as usual and all will be fine.
>>
>> A more complex approach is to install GeoServer 2.1 and cascade the
>> WMS you usually use through GWC and make sure to visit all the main
>> areas of interest you might want to see later before you leave the
>> network and every thing will be in the cache. This might even work
>> with a slow link back to base to fill in any new areas you visit.
>>
>> Ian
>>
>> --
>> Ian Turton
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-- 
Puneet Kishor http://www.punkish.org
Carbon Model http://carbonmodel.org
Charter Member, Open Source Geospatial Foundation http://www.osgeo.org
Science Commons Fellow, http://sciencecommons.org/about/whoweare/kishor
Nelson Institute, UW-Madison http://www.nelson.wisc.edu
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