[Openstreetmap] ecourier.co.uk GPS data mine

Saul Albert saul at twenteenthcentury.com
Tue Jun 28 14:41:22 BST 2005


Dear OSM,

Well I just had a *very* intereasting meeting with Jay, the cto of
ecourier.co.uk - they're running a very slick-looking courier-logistics
business, delivering real-time-trackable packages to businesses in the
city. Their offices are like some kind of 1996 web-company throwback,
growing like mad, new open plan workspaces springing up like mushrooms as
they take on new swathes of staff.... 

Anyway, they're totally into the free mapping thing and their GPRS / GPS
toting army of 60 couriers are clocking up about 1.5 million gps points /
day, which they're collecting in a mssql database, then just dumping
them all after a week so their M$ database doesn't fall over.

If we can suggest an easy way for Jay to give us a weekly dump before he
flushes the database, and hopefully automate that, this could be a very
very useful source of data..

Would anyone from the dev team be up for talking to him about how to do
this? It's going to be a bit of a 'mare, because he's already said
there's no way he could put a script on the server.. they're too precious
about that, but I don't see why we couldn't put a *nix box in their
offices that fires off a query to the server once a week pre-dump,
applies any necessary formatting / futzing to the results, and blats them
striaght up to OSM.

I *could* attempt to do something like that myself, but it would probably
take me 1000* longer than anyone with a clue and is less likely to
work...

help!

X

S.
-- 
-- http://chinabone.lth.bclub.org.uk/~saul/




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