Routing [LWN.net]

Routing

Posted Mar 18, 2010 10:26 UTC (Thu) by epa (subscriber, #39769)
Parent article: Fun with free maps on the free desktop

There are certainly many websites which do routing from OSM data, such as OpenRouteService, CloudMade Maps, and the free software Routino. However you do need a lot of disk space to store data for the whole planet, or even just one country (the Routino demo site is for Britain and Ireland only). The OSM 'planet file' data dump is currently eight gigabytes, compressed. Then you have to load it into some kind of database and index it for routing calculations. So until bandwidth and disk space improve to the point where Linux distributions can include a set of geodata as part of the default installation, perhaps routing is best done as a web service.

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Routing

Posted Mar 18, 2010 11:42 UTC (Thu) by roberton (guest, #39680) [Link]

[Dons flame-proof underpants]

What is wrong with using web-based mapping which doesn't use OSM (or "free" data). In other words, enlighten me why I should feel bad using Google Maps :-)

Roberto/.

Routing

Posted Mar 18, 2010 14:00 UTC (Thu) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

There's nothing wrong with using Google Maps, or an iPod, or Microsoft Excel, but since this is Linux Weekly News we tend to discuss projects using free software and free data.

Routing

Posted Mar 19, 2010 14:55 UTC (Fri) by gerv (subscriber, #3376) [Link]

Because you can't fix it when it's wrong, there are many things you can't legally use the maps for (e.g. printing on a flyer), you or others can't customize the rendering (e.g. to create a cycle map or a public transport map) and the level of detail, in many urban areas, is now way worse in Google than in OSM. Look at London for example.

http://tools.geofabrik.de/mc/?mt0=mapnik&mt1=googlema...

Gerv

Routing

Posted Mar 31, 2010 8:55 UTC (Wed) by jku (guest, #42379) [Link]

Just like open source software, open data gives you a lot more room to do things you didn't expect you'd want to do when you originally started with the software/service/data.

Gerv already mentioned printing flyers. Maybe you'd also like to access your maps offline? Or use another visual layout that better suits your specific use case? The examples are not that hard to find...

Of course you can keep using Google Maps and only change when you realise you do need to do something the Google license prohibits. I'm lazy and not really interested in reading licenses so I've gone with OSM -- with CC-BY-SA I at least have a possibility of understanding what is legal and what is not.

Routing

Posted Mar 19, 2010 11:36 UTC (Fri) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

That said, I remember 'Autoroute Express' running on a PC with four megs of RAM in 1991, and it wasn't too big or slow (it could be installed from a handful of floppies for the UK and Ireland map). So if there were some way to condense down the OSM data to major routes only, it would be practical to include a desktop route planner program in Linux distributions.

Routing

Posted Mar 19, 2010 20:10 UTC (Fri) by cry_regarder (subscriber, #50545) [Link]

There is also navit which does routing on the desktop with OSM. I successfully used navit on a freerunner using OSM to navigate around Tallin, Estonia. It even had Hell Hunt loaded as a POI.

Cry