Offline tiled map web app

You might be interested in the projects Maps on a Stick and MapBox iPad. (disclaimer: designed the former, involved in the latter. however, both are BSD-licensed, and the underlying tile format, termed ".mbtiles", is SQL-based.)

Maps on a Stick is an offline OpenLayers map. The main reasoning for going with a portable database/server instead of client side storage is that using browsers as large data storage isn't quite worked out and populating and indexing the cache can be costly.

Think you will need to create your own tilecache on 'localhost' see http://code.google.com/p/cumberland/wiki/TilePyramiderAndOpenLayers

Examples

    Using vmap
    http://localhost:8081/vmap0/levelzero/0/0.png
    The tile near the middle of the tile set in the third zoom level of vmap0.
    http://localhost:8081/vmap0/leveltwo/3/4.png
    The tile near the middle of the tile set in the fifth zoom level of landsat2000.
    hhttp://localhost:8081/vmap0/landsat2000/1/8500/8500.png
Source:
    The tile at the origin of the tile set in the first zoom level of basemap.
    http://www.osgeo.org/services/basemap/L1/0/0.png

Note: must not have spaces

One complexity that seems to show up in articles about this is that:

Note that the MIME type of the manifest file is text/cache-manifest.

And the examples all seem to list specific files to cache (but I may need to read further).