[OSGeo-Discuss] High level guidance/info requested

[Alex Mandel]

On 05/22/2014 09:20 AM, roghellman wrote:
> I have written healthcare software that merges medical records with GPS data. 
> It is for use in developing countries, where Internet access is less than
> dependable. 
> 
> When the Internet is available, I send the medical data to the cloud, where
> I can map disease patterns and scan it for instances of contagious diseases. 
> Usually in real-time.
> 
> The software was designed to work off-line (and it does), but when off-line,
> right now, maps are not available to the application.  Clearly I need to
> cache tiles for off-line use.
> 
> There seem to be a number of options available.  However, the world of
> mapping is new to me and my ignorance profound.
> 
> The environment I am working in, is Apache, postgres, and PHP.   But I only
> have an installer working for Windows.
> 
> I've come across tilecache and mapserver.   Are there other that I should
> look at?   Any advice would be appreciated.
> 

Off-line mobile or desktop? Application or Browser based?

A lot of people use a format called MBTiles to store offline caches of
tiles locally. Generally with OpenStreetMap tiles this is quite an
acceptable use. GDAL/OGR can read mbtiles along with other tools for use
in an application you make.

For Google maps they have very specific methods of caching locally using
their api (might be mobile device only).

Hope that gives you some direction to start looking.

Thanks,
Alex