I forgot to hit reply all, so forwarding my mail to the strategic list this time.<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">---------- Forwarded message ----------<br><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div class="im">On Sun, Jan 30, 2011 at 12:58 AM, Milo van der Linden <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:milo@dogodigi.net" target="_blank">milo@dogodigi.net</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
It is my personal opinion that routing should not be something the foundation will facilitate. Why? Because it will ask a lot of the hardware and it is not part of the OpenStreetMap foundation mission statement.<br></blockquote>
<div><br></div></div><div>I would like to try and make a counter argument of why I think a routing demo should be part of the osm main page, and as such an instance run on OSMF hardware.</div><div><br></div><div>For one, I think it does belong to the mission statement of OSMF and secondly I don't think it will ask unduly of hardware resources. Currently it doesn't look like it would need any more resources than tileserving or search, rather much less and so should be within the budget of OSMF. Also I would be reasonably confident that if OSMF is strapped for cache, it would get the necessary money for a routing server quite quickly if it did a specific donation drive for a routing server.</div>
<div><br></div><div>But the reasoning for why it belongs to OSMFs mission just as much as a tileserver and a search engine is more importantly.</div><div><br></div><div>I think there are at least two good reasons why it is worth for OSMF to invest some money into routing (and these apply equally to tile serving and search)</div>
<div><br></div><div>The core product that OSM tries to create is the raw data and that of course is what the main aim has to be about. Ensure that the data grows as much as possible while assuring the highest possible quality.</div>
<div><br></div><div>But if the OSM webpage only offered a link to a 14Gb compressed XML dump it would be hard to interest many people beyond tech companies and geeks, both together by far not large enough a group to create a good map and keep it maintained to high standards. So show casing a few examples of what can be done with OSM data (like a pretty slippy map, a search box or routing) straight on the main page is quite vital to geting the broader public interested. They have to see why it is relevant to them, why they should care, and what they get out of OSM for spending loads of their time in creating the data.</div>
<div><br></div><div>The second reason is quality assurance. Routing is quickly becoming one of the most important use cases of OSM data. With companies like MapQuest, CloudMade, Skobbler, Navmii, mapfactor and hobby projects like garmin maps, gosmore and gpsmid, there appear to be by now thousands if not tens or even hundreds of thousands of people actually using OSM for routing, many of them haven't even heard of OSM before. It offers a huge potential for recruiting new mappers. Yet the OSM data is stil relatively poor quality for routing.</div>
<div><br></div><div>While people are for example mapping trees and lampposts or go and e.g. trace random remote villages in countries they have never been to as some mappers no longer know what to add otherwise, turn-restrictions speed limits and other routing relevant tags are distinctly lacking.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Although there are bound to be many reasons for why there is such a lack of routing tags in the data. One I think is particularly strong is that they aren't shown on the main mapnik map. There is a reason why it was such a big step to get rendering updates down from the weekly update cycle to the minutely diffs and people immediately start complaining if the rendering falls behind. People want instant gratification of seeing that the work they have done "shows up on the map". There currently is no equivalent for routing tags and so there is little incentive to add them.</div>
<div><br></div><div>I am fairly confident that if OSM would include a router on the main page, people would start adding turn restrictions, access restrictions or speed limits, if that is what it takes to ensure the routes they try out no longer show up incorrectly. Routing on the main page could be a mayor Q/A tool and that surely is within the core scope of OSMF.</div>
<div><br></div><div>I think one example of what highlights the quality problem for routing particularly is the connectivity. Take a look at e.g. <a href="http://tools.geofabrik.de/osmi/?view=routing&lon=-0.15948&lat=51.53711&zoom=8" target="_blank">http://tools.geofabrik.de/osmi/?view=routing&lon=-0.15948&lat=51.53711&zoom=8</a> which shows the number of roads that are nearly connected but not quite. Most of them look perfectly fine on the rendered map, but for a router they cause completely wrong routes. So even in well mapped areas, there many such connectivity bugs.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Hopefully many more of these problems would be fixed, if more people would on top of haveing a look at the rendered map after uploading their changes to check everything is correct also try out some routes through the area they added and verify that it works for routing.</div>
<div><br></div><div>In general, there are so many great QA tools already, but they are all distributed accross various sites so that hardly anyone knows about them or bothers visiting these extra sites, so imho it is of strategic interest to integrate some of these more tightly into the main OSM stack, to ensure the data is of the highest possible quality.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Routing is becoming such an important use of OSM data, imho it deserves some resources (and don't think it would be hard to get them) to help improve the data for it. It would also address one of the biggest wishes mappers have to improving the OSM webpage.</div>
<div><br></div><div>I also think it should be of core interest to SWG of which activities and services OSMF should support and fund to grow and improve the data the fastest and most efficiently. </div><div><br></div><font color="#888888"><div>
Kai</div></font><div><div></div><div class="h5"><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><br>There are a lot of routing initiatives with openstreetmap, some are commercial, some are opensource, some are considering to one day become open. Besides that, pgrouting, the postgresql/postgis routing engine is picking up speed and as opposed to gosmore, pgrouting is ready for turn-by-turn navigation, but it also can handle travelingsalesman, A* and other advanced routing techniques. I often asked myself, why are there so many routing initiatives and why aren't they joining forces to create one or two kick-ass routing systems? I cannot figure it out.<br>
<br>A role the OSMF might take is see if there are sponsors particularly interested in providing funds for routing, then facilitate in bringing developers together and let them work something out with only one real demand: That the routing-engine is completely opensource. But as I said before it doesn't fit the OpenStreetMap foundation mission statement in my opinion.<br>
<br>Last time I dug into the gosmore fileformat, I noticed that it doesn't maintain reference to openstreetmap way id's, this makes it impossible to look up streetnames that could generate output like "go straight on 5th av for 3 miles, turn left on central square, go straight for 1 mile on 12th street, turn right on main". gosmore simply generated one linestring. But this was 6 months ago and things might have changed.<br>
<br>Anyway, my answer would be no, and I would prefer if we can look into getting strategic up to steam on more foundation related matters first.<br><br>Kind regards,<br><br>Milo van der Linden<br><br><br><br><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">
2011/1/29 Mikel Maron <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:mikel_maron@yahoo.com" target="_blank">mikel_maron@yahoo.com</a>></span><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);padding-left:1ex">
<div><div></div><div>
<div><div style="font-family:garamond,new york,times,serif;font-size:12pt">Strategic<br>
<br>
We've been asked to look into Routing by Nic Roets, author of Gosmore. On the agenda for next time,<br><div> </div><div>Best<br>Mikel<br><br></div>== Mikel Maron ==<br>+254(0)724899738 @mikel s:mikelmaron<br><span><a href="http://mapkibera.org/" target="_blank">http://mapkibera.org/</a></span><br>
<span><a href="http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Haiti" target="_blank">http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Haiti</a></span><div><br></div><div style="font-family:garamond,new york,times,serif;font-size:12pt">
<br><div style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:10pt"><font face="Tahoma" size="2">----- Forwarded Message ----<br><b><span style="font-weight:bold">From:</span></b> Richard Weait <<a href="mailto:richard@weait.com" target="_blank">richard@weait.com</a>><br>
<b><span style="font-weight:bold">To:</span></b> Mikel Maron <<a href="mailto:mikel_maron@yahoo.com" target="_blank">mikel_maron@yahoo.com</a>><br><b><span style="font-weight:bold">Cc:</span></b> Nic Roets <<a href="mailto:nroets@gmail.com" target="_blank">nroets@gmail.com</a>>; Kai Krueger
<<a href="mailto:kakrueger@gmail.com" target="_blank">kakrueger@gmail.com</a>><br><b><span style="font-weight:bold">Sent:</span></b> Sat, January 29, 2011 5:46:36 AM<br><b><span style="font-weight:bold">Subject:</span></b> Re: Routing on OSM<br>
</font><br><br>As I understand it Nic has access to dev and is running a router there.<br><br><a href="http://nroets.dev.openstreetmap.org/demo/index.html?layers=B000FTFTT" target="_blank">http://nroets.dev.openstreetmap.org/demo/index.html?layers=B000FTFTT</a><br>
<br>SWG involvement might extend as far as "Does OSMF want routing on our<br>hardware?" We looked at that a while back but not since formalizing<br>SWG. We should probably put it on the agenda some time and take a run<br>
at it.<br><br>If OSMF wants to run routing services the following questions likely<br>belong to TWG:<br><br>- Which routing engines meet our requirements for stability and performance?<br>- What infrastructure is required to run it?<br>
- What will be required to manage growth of
that service?<br>- How should we implement routing?<br></div></div>
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