Topographic tile cache needed to replace OSM street map data in an app

Question

I have developed and marketed an application that successfully uses a pre loaded tile cache of Open Street Map .png files for a small city area about 20km x20km to support the presentation of tourist information on the web, iPad and iPhone. It is written in HTML5 and uses MoSync to create the wrapper to deliver it on the mobile devices.

This approach works well for cities but I would like to extend the app to work in countryside areas (in the UK initially) where if I could access it, Ordnance Survey mapping 25000,50000 and 250000 would deliver a much better user experience.

My specific questions are:

How do I get hold of topographic tiles? Can I get tiles that have the same slippy map structure as OSM. Can I use Ordnance Survey as a source for the UK and if so is it a one off license fee? What zoom levels are available? I expect 25000, 50000 and 250000. Is 100000 available? What formula do I use to identify the specific tile from a lat and long pair? Will all the tiles at a specified zoom level be the same delta lat and delta long? If not how do I tile them?

Answer 1

Here you will find a list of tile servers that use the same format as Openstreetmap does:

http://josm.openstreetmap.de/wiki/Maps

If you get hold of untiled digital topographic maps (like I got from the Netherlands), I have discribed a workflow to get tiles of them here:

How practical is this workflow, tiling from a complex, multi-step GDAL VRT?

To convert between lat/long and tilenames, you find formulas and code here:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Slippy_map_tilenames

And yes, all tiles using this scheme will have the same content when using the folder and naming convention.

If you want to use the tiles for an app, please respect the tile usage policy of the provider.