[Routing] Help with routing using Open Street Map Data‏

[Craig Timothy Herndon (cthrndon)]

Hello,



My name is Craig, I'm an undergraduate in Computer Science at the Univeristy of Memphis in the State of Tennessee.I originally asked my question here http://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/6418/parsing-an-osm-xml-file-for-navigation-purposes
However, as suggested I am contacting this mailing list because I believe it is full of other people also using Open Street Map for routing purposes. 
 I'm trying to use OSM to get data for a mock navigation system in my city. However when I download the OSM data there is a lot of extraneous data that I do not need. Before I ask for help, I'll go ahead and explain what I'm trying to do. My problem statement is that I wish to treat an intersection as a node and have all the "highways"(as OSM's definition of highway, which to my understanding is any street) that connect to that node be treated as if they were an edge on a graph. Is there an api that could assist me in this I.E. Navit, gosomore, Read only api's ect? Also, how should I scan the file for what I need? What I'm thinking I need is a for each intersection  latitude and longitude along with a list of connected highway and it's associated weights. This would be it's own node. Does anyone have a suggestion for the appropriate data structure? I'm also considering using a sax parser so as to only collect data that is needed as opposed to being forced to collect all the information prior to running the routing algorithm.  I'm trying to figure out how I should attack this problem and could use some suggestions from more experienced people.





Thank you for your help in advance,


                                                               ~Craig Herndon