[Talk-GB] Soft launch of That Shouldn't Be Possible prototype

[Robert Scott]

Hello talk-gb,

As some of you might know, I've been working on a gps trace analyzer I call That Shouldn't Be Possible.

Its purpose? To accept a gps trace of a drive/cycle you've gone for, analyze the journey against the routable OSM database and, if appropriate, say "That Shouldn't Be Possible". Used like this, it can find quite a lot of routing problems or road segments missing from the database.

It can also be used to take the hard work out of checking the OSM database against your trace after a long journey by flagging up sections that don't quite agree with OSM.

Not quite sure whether you've got that complex junction interlinked and tagged right? Have a gps trace or two that traverses it? That Shouldn't Be Possible might be able to help you.

I've written a lot more about it on the wiki[1], so I'm not going to duplicate all that blather here.

The news is that it's reached a point where I really should start opening it to the public. So I'm now running a prototype instance of it[2] on errol which is just running for the british isles. Why just the british isles? Partly out of tentativeness and partly because keeping the data updated is quite computationally expensive and running it for the whole planet is beyond the resources currently available to me. It's also only available for car transport type initially for similar reasons. But it will work with bicycle traces too as long as you haven't made car-disallowed shortcuts which would confuse it.

I invite everyone to try it out with some of their traces.


robert.

[1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/That_Shouldnt_Be_Possible
[2] http://ris.dev.openstreetmap.org/tsbp-proto/