[Routing] Routing web-services?

[OJW]

On Monday 19 November 2007 07:23:42 Marcus Wolschon wrote:
> so you limit your map-size to single cities?
> I take it you want to do navigation for pedestrians then?
>
> I thought about navigating for cars between cities as
> even the smallest cell-phones can have a 2GB SD-card
> with a (commercial, compressed) map of europe.

Is anyone working on webservers for this kind of stuff, where your mobile 
device can request http://something/from_pos/to_pos/by_car and get back a 
list of lat/long points?

It seems that long-distance driving is something that you normally plan in 
advance.  So before leaving you can go within range of a wifi hotspot and 
download your route from the OSM routing server.  

(While you're there, you download all the map images in a 10km corridor along 
that route, to help you find your way around)

That way, all the gigabytes of routing data, the PostGIS databases, and all 
the associated processing can be put on one computer somewhere, and even a 
very simple mobile device would be able to download and display routes. 

(or alternatively, you can fill that SD card with music for the journey 
instead of routing tables)

The mobile devices can still grab vector data for the cities you go through, 
so that you can find your way around one-way systems, get past closed roads 
and missed junctions, etc.   Once you're out of the city, you can go back to 
following the preprepared route.

If you encounter a real problem (your inter-city route isn't available), then 
you could phone the routing server to get new directions, which would just be 
a few KB of data for the route, rather than all the data you'd need to plan 
it yourself.


If someone wants to get this stuff running on a server, I can show pyroute 
acting as a client for the routing webservice, displaying it over the top of 
tile images, combining it with intra-city routing, etc.

Regards,

OJW