[Strategic] Featured routing services

[Eugene Usvitsky]

Hi all,

I hope during today meeting routing question will at last be discussed
so here are a few pages for your information.
First is guidelines proposal, based on Featured tiles guidelines -
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Strategic_working_group/New_Routing_services_Guidelines_Proposal
Second is a comparison chart of all currently available online routers
- http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Strategic_working_group/Featured_routing_services

I believe we should discuss 2 different questions:
- which service should be used for website
- which service should be used for internal data quality checks?
My documents give answer only to the first question. In my opinion,
MapQuest routing engine is the most feature-rich among all commercial
and non-commercial. We can't (or better shouldn't) use several routing
engines for website because it will confuse its users, so our choice
is MapQuest API.

Service for internal data quality checks which will be hosted
internally is more complex thing. It heavily depends on current
resources available so I think that TWG are better people to discuss
and choose. It can be gosmore, Roadeeno, Routino, special instance of
YOURS or something else. Currently I am interested in something
different - do we really need routing for data quality? As far as I
understand, routing can check 2 things:
- road intersections
- turn restrictions, maxspeeds and other road limitations
As for general road intersection errors, JOSM has a special validator
for this without any routing. It is easier to run something similar
using OSM database than to use a full routing engine.
As for turn restrictions, they can be checked only by local community
so it can't be done planet-wide. That is why some internal checker
will not help - local community can use any online routing engines
like listed above or any software to check for this errors.

So to summarize: my opinion is to choose MapQuest for website and
implement some automatic road intersection checker for database.

Best wishes,
Eugene Usvitsky.