[Routing] Crowdsourced costing - offer of writing a client+metric for it

[Kyle Gordon]

Frederik Ramm wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Jaak Laineste wrote:
>   
>> I would suggest to have live traffic event data, collectable mostly using
>> mobile devices from the road. The events could be:
>>     
>
> To all those wo suggest some sort auf automatic data collection for 
> routing, my answer is: Yes, this may be a good idea, but others will 
> beat us to it. Tomtom, Garmin, Google - whoever does routing will have 
> an interest in that, and will, as soon as feasible, make devices that 
> actually report the traffic situation in real-time.
>
> We might be able to match that with a lot of effort and hacking their 
> devices to report data to us as well, but we'll never be the frontrunner 
> on this topic.
>
> But the one thing we have and they don't is, we have an expert among us 
> for almost every single road! We have someone who lives round the corner 
> and who can tell us first-hand whether the road is likely to be blocked 
> or difficult at certain times, which path he would use, and so on. This 
> is the key thing that sets us apart from the big players, and we must 
> make use of this capacity. Automatic derivation of traffic situation 
> data is not an OSM USP, everyone can (and will) do it.
>
> Bye
> Frederik
>
>   

Traffic reporting has already been done, by an open source friendly
company too. The guys who make the OpenMoko Freerunner also make the
Dash Express. It reports traffic data back in near realtime to their
servers for processing and retransmission. I wonder if they'd be
amenable to opening up their data. We can but ask...

TomTom provide a similar system through the company they bought a while
back, Applied Generics. It takes mobile tracking data from the telcos,
and shovels it back into their traffic data system. Slightly beyond our
means though, and TomTom have a vested interest in keeping the data to
themselves (and I doubt the telco would hand it out for free)

There's hope for OSM yet :-)

Kyle

-- 
Kyle Gordon - 2M1DIQ
Web: http://lodge.glasgownet.com
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