P2P Search using Hyperswarm

[jj10133]

Hi @lonvia, firstly I would like to thank you for creating this project and serving it. I didn't know more about maps but curiosity lead me here and my project on sharing location in realtime using P2P network for mobile users. I had a maps issue since I didn't want to collect data so I tried learn more about mbtiles and pmtiles, protomaps was the way to go for testing purpose and I was able to serve the maps in Hypercore (small chunks of tiles that would ask peers to get it and only download the required ones).

From this I got this idea that can i make a complete offline map with search features as well, so I landed here from youtube. I saw that you were working on sqlite db, so I would like to ask more on this if forward searching is done? At present I just want address and POIs search if we could have that, plus i'm thinking more about it.

Please tell me if we could actually achieve this, like i don't know anything about maps or search much, again thank you for creating this project.

[lonvia]

Offline database use was exactly what I had in mind when experimenting with the sqlite databases. So in principle it should do what you want: download a search file, start up the Nominatim python code, have a full search engine.

The main issue right now is size. A fully filled search database is a heavy beast, around 700GB in size. That's not exactly useful for an offline database. There is probably a lot of room to reduce the size by cutting away unneeded data. That requires looking through the OSM source data and understanding which parts might be left out.

Another open question is partitioning. It would be good to be able to download regions separately and then be able to combine them in search. There is a quite old issue talking about getting rid of the global search table and working on country partitions instead. I still think this is a valid approach and could be the base for a search that supports going to different databases (or sqlite database files in your case).