[Strategic] Featured routing services

[Kai Krueger]

Hi,

On 04/03/11 01:43, Eugene Usvitsky wrote:
> 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.

If I remember correctly at least at the beginning MQ routing API did not 
support the tagging of turn restrictions. Good support of the routing 
specific tagging however should be one of the most important aspects of 
the choice of routing engine. Imho, the purpose of having a routing 
engine on the main page is to finally provide a visualisation of the 
routing specific tagging that is so far (obviously) not shown at all in 
the pixel based visualisation of tiles.

Has MQ implemented turn restrictions by now?

I have thus added a set of routing attributes that a engine should / 
could support to the Featured routing services, although I am not 
familiar enough with all of the services to fill it out of the top of my 
head.



>
> 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.

Imho the point of a routing engine was less of an automated checking 
system, but more of a way to visualise the data, to give people a manual 
possibility to verify that the data they have entered is correct in a 
way relevant to a router, as well as give them a motivation to correctly 
tag things as they can see that it improves the data. Just like the 
pixel based tiles does for many of the other attributes that get tagged 
in OSM.

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

Imho, we should aim for a system equivalent to the tile switcher, I.e. 
have the possibility to easily switch between routing engines, in the 
form of a drop down box to select the engine one wants to use.

One of the key advantages of OSM is that it can be used in many 
different ways by many different people. By showing a reasonable (large) 
number of tile layers on the homepage, this message gets reinforced, 
that OSM is not the one tile layer, but a project to create a diverse 
set of services on top of the data. The same would be true for routing. 
By having easily selected a large number of different routing engines, 
it shows that OSM is not about the one routing engine or the software, 
but the data, and that can be used in many ways.

Kai



>
> Best wishes,
> Eugene Usvitsky.
>
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