A new open source map viewer for Gnome desktop has just been launched, called Emerillon.  Emerillon uses OpenStreetMap data to produce the maps. This data is currently downloaded and cached from OpenStreetMap.org, but in the coming months Emerillon will have the ability to download the OpenStreetMap database and to render it locally. This will be based on a patch for libchamplain that was produced by Simon Wenner for his Google Summer of Code project.

Emerillon is designed to be extensible and initially ships with two plugins: a search plugin, and a placemark plugin. The search plugin uses the Geonames web service to search for locations.

Emerillon started about 12 months ago as a project by Marco Barisione. It is now supported by Novopia.

For further information, see Pierre-Luc Beaudoin's blog announcement and the official Emerillon website.