[Routing] generalized routing format - comments on degree 2

[Marcus Wolschon]

On Mon, 20 Oct 2008 06:18:46 -0700, "Tristram Gräbener"
<tristramg at gmail.com> wrote:
> Well, thus the conclusion of this thread is that there is no way to make
> some kind of universal routing database ?

Maybe not a database but there is a good chance for a universal
binary format. If it is capable of storing all we know, it will
still be capable of storing what a single developer needs after
throwing out everything else.
I think that we could use an indexed format to store things
like forests and unreduced ways (even if "only" for painting
the result) but allow for custom data to be stored alongside.

Think of allowing to store a custom attribut with each node
that contains a next node reachable by car, the pre-computed
length of the way to that node and the id of the way to use
(to compute other metrics).
This gives you your G(N, A)-graph with full indexing but still
stores everything you need for the metrices and everything an
application written by someone else needs to visualise your
route or generate driving-instructions from it.
These applications will ignore your custom attributes but
still no data needs to be dublicated on disk and the data
for your routing and other people's map-paiting, driving-instructions
or roadwork/traffic-jam -updates have the exactly same version
of the local database you have because it's the same file.


Marcus