[Strategic] Featured routing services

[Eugene Usvitsky]

Frederik,

>> 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?
>
> Maybe the first question to discuss is whether routing is desired at all.

As far as I can remember a preliminary discussion which lead to these
comparison charts, the general idea was that we do need routing.

> Personally I would not use an external routing service on our web site. If
> someone wants to use MapQuest's routing engine, then why not go to
> open.mapquest.com where it is readily available?

I can understand your concerns and partially agree with them. However,
here is a choice should be made. Routing (and nay other additional
services) attract people who can start contribute to the project. The
better these service will be the more people will use the project. So
we have 2 variants - to build these services by themselves (a
difficult and long task involving a lot of financial investments which
OSM doesn't have) or let others do it for us and use it. I prefer the
second variant partly because commercial companies make money with it
so they do their best to make everything as good as possible.

>> 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:
>
> OSM thrives on the "unexpected" uses people find for our data. It will be
> the same with a routing engine that can be used for quality checking -
> people would not be limited to the two things that you can currently think
> of; people would find their own uses.

Here I don't currently understand the situation. AFAIK, internal
checker is "internal" because it will not provide API for anyone
outside core project developers. So there will not be any "people".
Anyway as I said, the choice of this checker is outside our
jurisdiction.

Best wishes,
Eugene Usvitsky.