Beach Trip (openclipart.org, Gerald_G, public domain)
Most of you might already have heard about it, but anyway, here are two additions to the open source routing pool.
Vodaphone released most of the code of their discontinued Wayfinder navigation product into the world wild web. It seems the code needs maintenance before it is useful. Let’s see whether some enthusiasts are taking over.
The far more interesting announcement, though, has been posted right at the beginning of this year’s State of the Map conference. The Open Source Routing Machine (OSRM) is a »high-perfomance routing backend«. Check out the demo provided via Geofabrik. It’s just some C code. After compilation, you’ll get a handful of binaries, including the usual tool to convert OSM XML data into some binary file format and a web server which handles the requests and delivers the resulting route.
The speed is just amazing. However, after reading some of the source code, it currently appears to obey the following limitations. What I recall:
- The result gets shipped in KML format. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I guess a GPX format was more versatile. I’m pretty sure, though, that KML has been chosen with reason.
- AFAIR there’s only the web server’s output, no file output.
- The code can only cope with a single tag per element, e.g. using the highway tag. It currently is not possible to select items by multiple tags, e.g.
highway=track,tracktype=grade1. - Most options are hard coded, so it’s not possible to play with the options by editing a configuration file.
Anyway, it’s the initial release, and it looks very promising. I’m pretty curious how it will be accepted by the community, how it will develop over time and whether there will be collaboration or competition between OSRM and Routino.
This is a good post.