Development and Integration of an Offline and Open Source Alternative Mapping Solution Antoine Abélard Spécinov, Angers, France Keywords: DotSpatial, Open Source GIS, C#, .NET, OpenStreetMap. Abstract: Nowadays, more and more business applications integrate Geographical Information System (GIS) to use and display data at the right place and the right time. However, this integration could face two problems. The first one is the integration cost of a commercial GIS and the second is cartographic data access. Indeed, the web map services used to provide cartographic background are charged depending on queries, so the cost of these services can increase quickly and the bill is not mastered. The second problem has occurred with the end of Microsoft MapPoint, so, this brings up the problem to find an offline mapping solution that can be integrated with business applications. There is a need to fill this gap and answer to these two main problems. This paper presents an offline and open source alternative which allow integration with business applications, a real business case of a truck tour management application has initiated this work. 1 INTRODUCTION GIS and mapping technologies have grown in popularity in recent years, especially since the success of Google Maps, Bing Maps and Here Maps, all available on the web. However, these GIS platforms do not meet the requirements of some business applications such as the cost and the offline mapping. The main issue of this study is about a business application of truck tour management called Biotour, it is a desktop application used by SARIA Industries (SARIA Group, 2015) and developed by Spécinov (Spécinov, 2015). SARIA Industries is specialized in collecting organic waste and biomass conversion. The group operates over 127 sites, in 12 European countries. SARIA Industries has four areas of expertise: Rendering, Food industry, Oleochemicals and Energy. Spécinov is an IT services company localized next to Angers in France. Working in partnership with a university research laboratory, Spécinov developed 11 years ago this tour management application named Biotour, used by SARIA Industries for his rendering activity in 20 sites in France. This activity involves the collection, transport and treatment of animal waste. The software is designed to calculate the best collection routes to optimize the human and material resources. This application was developed in VB and C# on .NET platform and used Microsoft MapPoint (Microsoft, 1999) for his cartographic rendering. But since MapPoint announce the end of his support, the sustainability of Biotour is threatened. Moreover, MapPoint was not built to manage multiple data layers and as important volumes of business data. So there were stability issues which stop the application or slowing it. In fact, MapPoint was the right choice 11 years ago due to the offline solution which is a key point for this application. So, today, the goal is to build a replacement solution which is offline and with a limited cost. The chosen solution will have to implement the same functionality as MapPoint, to display data with the same rendering and to be more stable. To build the alternative solution we have to find the two main features of a mapping solution: a GIS platform and a data provider. In the MapPoint solution, both are integrated. The present work is divided into 8 sections. We present the data provider OpenStreetMap in section 2. Section 3 introduces the GIS platform DotSpatial. The application architecture is given in section 4. Section 5 details the management of data layers in the solution both concerning the cartographic layers and the business layers. In section 6 we describe the management of interactions. Afterwards, section 7 Abélard, A. Development and Integration of an Offline and Open Source Alternative Mapping Solution. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Geographical Information Systems Theory, Applications and Management (GISTAM 2016), pages 139-144 ISBN: 978-989-758-188-5 Copyright c  2016 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved 139