[Strategic] Fw: Routing on OSM

[Frederik Ramm]

Milo,

    just a few quick words because this is, after all, not osm-routing:

Milo van der Linden wrote:
> It is my personal opinion that routing should not be something the 
> foundation will facilitate. Why? Because it will ask a lot of the 
> hardware and it is not part of the OpenStreetMap foundation mission 
> statement.

I tend to share that sentiment, however the point has been made by some 
that routing - if done properly and integrated well, i.e. not necesarily 
"end-user-facing" - could be a major quality driver. See 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/TIGER_fixup/250_cities/routing_grid 
for an example how routing was used in an automated fashion to assess 
data quality. There are also many OSM users who would like us to offer a 
better map user experience on www.openstreetmap.org, including routing. 
Personally, I'm more a "www.openstreetmap.org is for mappers, let end 
users go to MapQuest and other user-optimised sites" person but other 
opinions do exist.

> Besides that, pgrouting, the postgresql/postgis routing engine is 
> picking up speed and as opposed to gosmore, pgrouting is ready for 
> turn-by-turn navigation, but it also can handle travelingsalesman, A* 
> and other advanced routing techniques. 

It is very unlikely that pgrouting will *ever* be able to deliver the 
badass performance you need for an user-facing routing engine. Also, 
Traveling Salesman is the name of a class of problems while A* is the 
name of a specific shortest-path algorithm. And A* (and its companions, 
Dijkstra and Shooting Star) are 1990's technology and certainly not 
"advanced routing techniques".

Which concludes this short off-topic message ;)

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"