Address maps for OsmAnd 2.1 -- FILES MISSING

[Max1234Ita]

Hello everybody.

I'm on OsmAnd+ 2.1 and got the road-only map of Italy (full country).

I was looking for the address map of the same country, in order to perform address searches, but I noticed it has disappeared from both the Dowload pages of OsmAnd and the web servers; the same files seem to be missing also for all the other countries in the World. Is that a problem in the server?

I know that newer maps for v.2.3 are better, but they require a nightly build installation, and I'd like to stay with the old "stable" version until v.2.3 is officially released...

Thanks for your attention.

Regards,
Max - Italy

1566

[Lennert Bakker]

I found the same problem. This way the roadmaps are allmost useless. I believe different Osmand versions use the same map files so no need to install another version. We need to tell the developers we'd like the adress files back.

Op vrijdag 9 oktober 2015 10:39:33 UTC+2 schreef Max1234Ita:

[Lennert Bakker]

After a little search I found out the new road maps should contain adresses and poi's. No need for a seperate download

Op vrijdag 9 oktober 2015 10:39:33 UTC+2 schreef Max1234Ita:

Hello everybody.

[Harry van der Wolf]

Hi Lennert,

We know this. The problem is that you need to select the region where "you think" is the address.

Especially as a foreigner when I need to search an address in, for example, Germany, I have no idea whether it is in Nordrein-Westphalen, Hesse, etc. (and I assume that this is also valid for a lot of Germans for small villages).

That's why you need a full country address maps for those split-up countries.

Harry

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[Max1234Ita]

On Monday, November 2, 2015 at 2:42:23 PM UTC+1, Harry van der Wolf wrote:

Hi Lennert,

We know this. The problem is that you need to select the region where "you think" is the address.

Especially as a foreigner when I need to search an address in, for example, Germany, I have no idea whether it is in Nordrein-Westphalen, Hesse, etc. (and I assume that this is also valid for a lot of Germans for small villages).

That's why you need a full country address maps for those split-up countries.

Harry

IMHO, all people in the World has the same problem, be the country big or small.
Maybe, inhabitants of Liechtenstein, Andorra, Monaco and similar small countries can remember where is every village and hamlet of his/her country; for all the others, it's big troubles... :-)


Regards,
Max - Italy

2387

[Lennert Bakker]

You're right! I forgot this was a big problem before I discovered the adress files. I agree we need them back!

Op maandag 2 november 2015 14:42:23 UTC+1 schreef Harry van der Wolf:

[Poutnik for NNTP]

If a country has a single file,
you need not to remember anything,
so it is problem for splitted countries only.

[Max1234Ita]

On Monday, November 2, 2015 at 5:27:57 PM UTC+1, Poutnik wrote:

If a country has a single file,
you need not to remember anything,
so it is problem for splitted countries only.

Yes, of course, and it "only" affects several thousands of users... who only have the culprit of living in a "splitted" country and now are cursing the day they chose OsmAnd as their favorite navigation app!

There are not splitted countries, but splitted maps, and the problem just makes angry everyone needing to navigate in those countries.
A working solution was available: we just want someone to put it back, .or provide another solution. It doesn't no matter if it's better or worse from development side, but it MUST be working.

Regards,
MAx - Italy

[CP]

Op 02-11-15 om 21:11 schreef Max1234Ita:

If a country has a single file,
you need not to remember anything,
so it is problem for splitted countries only.

Yes, of course, and it "only" affects several thousands of users... who only have the culprit of living in a "splitted" country and now are cursing the day they chose OsmAnd as their favorite navigation app!

There are not splitted countries, but splitted maps, and the problem just makes angry everyone needing to navigate in those countries.
A working solution was available: we just want someone to put it back, .or provide another solution. It doesn't no matter if it's better or worse from development side, but it MUST be working.

Same here. I just downloaded all 20 files comprising Italy as I don't know where what is. I now have to go to OSM or Google Maps to search for what I need, and then I get to fire up OsmAnd for navigation. Extremely annoying.

So, my NAS is running on Nas4Free (FreeBSD). I have plenty of diskspace left and practically unlimited bandwidth (FTTH). I am willing to setup a Syncthing or btsync repository for the big files. But then I appreciate if someone can walk me through the bits of building the map files.

Cheers,
Ceaus

[Harry van der Wolf]

I'm on a business trip right now, but I still have all the scripts when I started the address files some 2 years ago.

I will take a look on Thursday.

But Victor already mentioned that he samw the omission and wanted to start regenerating them as well.

Harry

[Harry van der Wolf]

2015-11-02 21:58 GMT+01:00 CP <ceau...@gmail.com>:

So, my NAS is running on Nas4Free (FreeBSD). I have plenty of diskspace left and practically unlimited bandwidth (FTTH). I am willing to setup a Syncthing or btsync repository for the big files. But then I appreciate if someone can walk me through the bits of building the map files.

I forgot to say that diskspace is nice, but you need enough memory. 8GB is really the absolute bottom limit for a country like Germany and now, 2 years later, I'm afraid it will not be enough. 

Italy will fit in 5-6 GB

Harry

[CP]

Op 02-11-15 om 22:25 schreef Harry van der Wolf:

So, my NAS is running on Nas4Free (FreeBSD). I have plenty of diskspace left and practically unlimited bandwidth (FTTH). I am willing to setup a Syncthing or btsync repository for the big files. But then I appreciate if someone can walk me through the bits of building the map files.

I forgot to say that diskspace is nice, but you need enough memory. 8GB is really the absolute bottom limit for a country like Germany and now, 2 years later, I'm afraid it will not be enough. 

Italy will fit in 5-6 GB

The NAS is fitted with 8 GB. But I have no problem replacing it with bigger memory banks for a good purpose.

BTW, you seem to only refer to the address list. But on a personal note I'm more interested in generating the bigger/combined country maps. If Victory is adding the address lists to the repo again, I may not need to generate the address list. But first lets see what your hidden treasury box has for scripts :-)

Cheers,
Ceaus

[Poutnik]

Dne 03/11/2015 v 21:22 CP napsal(a):

The NAS is fitted with 8 GB. But I have no problem replacing it with bigger memory banks for a good purpose.

BTW, you seem to only refer to the address list. But on a personal note I'm more interested in generating the bigger/combined country maps. If Victory is adding the address lists to the repo again, I may not need to generate the address list. But first lets see what your hidden treasury box has for scripts :-)

On one side, I understand the need to divide really big country maps. OTOH, it goes to the opposite extremes. Big country maps are being unnecessarily fragmented to too many pieces, often size of few dozens of MB,  following usually historical regions. If a country map would have e.g. about 1500 MB, and if acceptable map size is e.g. about 500 MB, than 3 pieces of similar sizes are enough. E.g  Country-North, Country-Central, Country-South.

E.g. the map of Czech republic was recently divided to 8 pieces, what is too many. They do not even follow historical nor current regions. Fortunately the whole map is retained as well.  Czech_Republic_Bohemia  and Czech_Republic_Moravia_Silesia would be enough, eventually  Czech_Republic_Bohemia_North , Czech_Republic_Bohemia_South and Czech_Republic_Moravia_Silesia.

Poutnik  ( the wanderer )

[Harry van der Wolf]

Hi,

There are 2 things to consider for the big countries.

First: A normal full country map for Germany would require at least 12GB working memory and would even run on very fast hardware for more then 12 hours. The memory and CPU requirements do not build up linearly but way faster (not exponentially, but I never did a mathemeatical analysis :) )

Secondly: Germany and France (and Canada and Russia?) would be bigger then 4 GB which would require you to convert your SD card to ext2/3/4 instead of fat32. This would be a big challenge for many users.

In the past I suggested to split up Germany in North and South, or 4 segments: North, South, West, East using the regions as borders. That would at least simplify a lot (from user perspective that is) and the sub maps would easily fit into the 4 GB size size limit.

And another thing I have suggested (at least twice) when searching is to simply combine all available region maps that are tagged as Germany, (be it 2, 5 or 7regions) and combine those addresses in one single search. Select country Germany, search city/address.

Another nav app, using north, south, west, east for Germany and France, is using that approach. If you have North and East Germany you simply search in country Germany. And if you don't find the city you are searching for, you know that you need either South or West Germany.

That works pretty well and especially as you only have 4 submaps, you don't need to find your way through 167 submaps (slightly exaggerated :) )

Harry

--

[Poutnik for NNTP]

On 11/04/2015 11:25 AM, Harry van der Wolf wrote:
> Hi,
>
> There are 2 things to consider for the big countries.
> First: A normal full country map for Germany would require at least 12GB
> working memory and would even run on very fast hardware for more then 12
> hours. The memory and CPU requirements do not build up linearly but way
> faster (not exponentially, but I never did a mathemeatical analysis :) )

hi Harry,

Yes, I can imagine the picture.

About 2-3 years ago I was used to generate vector maps
for the small 900 kB J2ME GPSMid navigation application
running on Symbian. ( It had even the "Eagle" perspective view,
what I miss in OSMAnd a lot. )

I made the maps from the Czech Republic PBF file ( cca 300 MB AFAIK ).
It was done by OSM2GPSMid J2ME application running on 64bit Java
on 6 GB RAM Vista64 E4700 Core2duo machine.

It took about 2 hours AFAIK, and 6 GB RAM was not much.

>
>
> And another thing I have suggested (at least twice) when searching is to
> simply combine all available region maps that are tagged as Germany, (be it
> 2, 5 or 7regions) and combine those addresses in one single search. Select
> country Germany, search city/address.
> Another nav app, using north, south, west, east for Germany and France, is
> using that approach. If you have North and East Germany you simply search
> in country Germany. And if you don't find the city you are searching for,
> you know that you need either South or West Germany.
> That works pretty well and especially as you only have 4 submaps, you don't
> need to find your way through 167 submaps (slightly exaggerated :) )

It should not be really that difficult to realize
that all maps with the name starting Germany belong each to other,
and to use a broad all Germany search, if current map fails.

Eventually, all Germany maps to be exposed in User GUI as a single map,
with particular map approaching as just OSMAnd internal thing.

[PoempelFox]

On Wednesday, November 4, 2015 at 11:25:09 AM UTC+1, Harry van der Wolf wrote:

There are 2 things to consider for the big countries.

First: A normal full country map for Germany would require at least 12GB working memory and would even run on very fast hardware for more then 12 hours. The memory and CPU requirements do not build up linearly but way faster (not exponentially, but I never did a mathemeatical analysis :) )

That really isn't that much memory nowadays, and your estimate is a little off, see below.

Secondly: Germany and France (and Canada and Russia?) would be bigger then 4 GB which would require you to convert your SD card to ext2/3/4 instead of fat32. This would be a big challenge for many users.

In the past I suggested to split up Germany in North and South, or 4 segments: North, South, West, East using the regions as borders. That would at least simplify a lot (from user perspective that is) and the sub maps would easily fit into the 4 GB size size limit.

It's actually worse: The limit is 2 GB if you want this to work reliably on all devices. FAT32 can in theory support 4 GB files, but not all implementations do.
Also, the JVM with osmandcreator in it crashes with "Bus Error" as soon as the file it creates crosses the 2 GB border, no matter how much memory you have - at least with OpenJDK, maybe the Oracle one is better.
And I agree that splitting into fewer parts would be an improvement for users.
Germany unfortunately is a little bit above 4 GB in total size, so you have to split it into at least three parts, I actually tried that out.
The conversion of that 3 files took 17 hours and had a peak memory usage of 26 GB in batch mode.
That's probably more memory than the average home PC has, but machines with >=32 GB RAM are very affordable. But I'm assuming the osmand project doesn't have any?
And just in case anyone else is interested in the files, they're available at https://ftp.fau.de/pub/tmp/. As the tmp in it suggests, that URL will only be temporary.

[CP]

Op 09-11-15 om 09:01 schreef PoempelFox:

Secondly: Germany and France (and Canada and Russia?) would be bigger then 4 GB which would require you to convert your SD card to ext2/3/4 instead of fat32. This would be a big challenge for many users.

In the past I suggested to split up Germany in North and South, or 4 segments: North, South, West, East using the regions as borders. That would at least simplify a lot (from user perspective that is) and the sub maps would easily fit into the 4 GB size size limit.

Also, the JVM with osmandcreator in it crashes with "Bus Error" as soon as the file it creates crosses the 2 GB border, no matter how much memory you have - at least with OpenJDK, maybe the Oracle one is better.
And I agree that splitting into fewer parts would be an improvement for users.
Germany unfortunately is a little bit above 4 GB in total size, so you have to split it into at least three parts, I actually tried that out.
The conversion of that 3 files took 17 hours and had a peak memory usage of 26 GB in batch mode.
That's probably more memory than the average home PC has, but machines with >=32 GB RAM are very affordable. But I'm assuming the osmand project doesn't have any?

I am now contemplating the idea to combine small maps into one. The benefit is that you always are in sync with the latest map revisions.
Secondly you don need to generate the map, but only combine / repackage maps.
As soon as I have time (which won't be anytime soon unfortunately) I will dissect OsmAndMapCreator to see if it can be modified to support this.
Suggestions are most welcome ofcourse!

If "big-iron" is the way to go: AWS servers are cheap.

Ceaus

[Harry van der Wolf]

2015-11-09 20:37 GMT+01:00 CP <ceau...@gmail.com>:

I am now contemplating the idea to combine small maps into one. The benefit is that you always are in sync with the latest map revisions.
Secondly you don need to generate the map, but only combine / repackage maps.
As soon as I have time (which won't be anytime soon unfortunately) I will dissect OsmAndMapCreator to see if it can be modified to support this.
Suggestions are most welcome ofcourse!

If "big-iron" is the way to go: AWS servers are cheap.

Ceaus

As you already mentioned: You can't combine maps with osmandmapcreator. 

You can combine maps with inspector.

The big drawback from inspector is that it will not really merge maps, but simply take the binary map objects from the specified obf containers into a new obf container.

So if you combine for example Bavaria and Baden-Würtenberg into a new container South-Germany.obf, you still have those 2 regions in your menu and not a new one South-Germany. Same for the address binary objects in those files.

Harry