[Geocoding] Reverse Geocoding to get road type information

[Sarah Hoffmann]

Hi,

On Tue, Mar 08, 2016 at 04:59:34PM +0000, jiangtao wrote:
> I'm a beginner using OSM service. Right now, I have a bunch of vehicle trajectory GPS coordinates with timestamp. I want to attach each GPS point with its corresponding road type, e.g, highway, local street. 
> Basically I could do reverse geocoding using Nominatim, while it only replies with street information, without road type information. And parsing the detailed page (detail,php) is not viable since my data volume is huge. 
> Do you have any insight of taking care about this kind of issue?
> Thanks in advance and looking forward to your reply.

What you are looking for is "map matching", i.e aligning a GPS track to
OSM data and a geocoder might not be the best tool for it. There is some
specialised software around.

The OSM router OSRM has some map matching capability. See the 'match'
service here: https://github.com/Project-OSRM/osrm-backend/wiki/Server-api

Also BMW Car IT has just this week releaseed a new open source tool:
http://www.bmw-carit.com/blog/barefoot-release-an-open-source-java-library-for-map-matching-with-openstreetmap/

Might be interesting as well.

Sarah