The main reason why I started contributing to openstreetmap was the fact that there was no geodata (neither freely nor commercially) available which fulfilled my needs as a cyclist. The Garmin eTrex Venture Cx had an option for bike routing, but did a rather poor (read as: useless) job. The Garmin maps missed the minor ways you want to use as a cyclist, and the routing (though you chose the bike option) always tried to send the cyclist to major roads. The global data providers (like Teleatlas and Navtec) obviously have been focussing on motorists, omitting the needs of cyclists and pedestrians.
My first idea to solve the issue was to make my very own maps, but obviously this required a lot of work. I immediately got the idea that some people must have had the same idea and there must be a project who creates a collaborative map. My search directly led to openstreetmap.org.
So I started to collect data for openstreetmap late in the summer of 2006. Karlsruhe, the city where I live, was nonexistent, so I used the dark autumn and winter months to traverse 70% of all Karlsruhe streets by bike. At this time, we had no slippy map. If you wanted to have a rendered map to enjoy your hard work, you did it yourself, by downloading your area as OSM XML and transform it to SVG. No prob for a passionate Linux user, but obviously not sufficient for average computer users.
It was a great desire to have the data displayed “on the road” via Garmin devices. Jochen Topf wrote osmgarminmap, which transformed OSM XML data to the polish format. This then could be compiled to a Garmin map using cGPSmapper, a shareware resp. commercial application to create Garmin maps. I set up a script to automate map creation and announced it via the talk and talk-de mailing lists. Besides Garmin devices, we used QLandkarte to view the resulting maps.
Unfortunately, the edition of cgpsmapper which can do routable maps barely was affordable. So we finally had OSM data as maps on the Garmins, but the last bit – routing, even for biking – was not freely available, though some people offered maps precompiled with cGPSmapper. The problem was that Garmin put some extra efforts into crypting the routing information in the map file format. While the base file format was documented by a Sourceforge project, the routing information still waited to be reverse engineered.
Yesterday, Robert Vollmert announced first experimental routing support for mkgmap on talk@openstreetmap.org. While this is good news, a lot of work still needs to be done before the routing will be pleasing. I’m pretty curious how this will influence the mapping, as mappers tend to map in a way that the data consumers (like renderers) will provide good results.
