[Openstreetmap] data explosion

[Lars Aronsson]

SteveC wrote:
> With much thanks to Saul we now have an arrangement to get lots of gps
> tracks from ecourier. I successfully imported last weeks track of
> 300,000 points in and around london and its up for viewing.

That's great news!  Will the source data files be available for 
download?  Can they be used outside of OSM?

> These links show their data overlapping with tracks we've made:
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/tmp/screen.jpg

Note how sparse the data are.  Just one or two dots per block.  
Seems they are using less than one-sample-per-second.  Just 
looking at the dots (and not the straight lines between adjacent 
dots), it will be very hard to determine where the roads are. This 
could be compensated by interpolating the missing one-second 
samples when the files are converted to GPX, but that would create 
very many more trackpoints.  Rethinking OSM from dots to lines 
would be the better approach.

> For those interested, there are nearly 7 million points now in the
> database.

Since the number of points depends entirely on the sample rate, I 
think time-spent should be the measurement for track data volume. 
How many hours of driving have we recorded?


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se