[OSM-talk] planet.osm powered "where am I"

[Nick Burch]

On Wed, 26 Jul 2006, Simon Hewison wrote:
> Ah, my old stamping ground (actually, the other side of the river).

Small world :)

> heading (degrees true) could also be useful,.

That was easy to add in, so it's now returned. More interesting results 
and filtering will need to wait until I can split out the db code from the 
display code. Maybe this weekend....

> This sort of function is pretty much critical for in-car navigation 
> stuff, but it also needs to work out which direction you are traveling, 
> and work out what direction the possible nearest roads are, so it can 
> work out which road you are on at a graded junction.

That shoud be fairly easy to calculate. Maybe when I've added a few more 
comments to the code, someone will find it helpful when writing such a 
beast!

> I can also think of a very good use for this. Feed a script a GPX file, 
> and it can traverse along the GPX file, and work out if it's on known 
> territory or not, and if you turn off onto 'uncharted' territory, it 
> could start building a set of nodes and segments until it meets up with 
> charted territory again.

As people have said, that's into the realm of osm-filter, and I'll leave 
it to that. It would be good to support it though, I do come across rather 
more overlapping segments with created_by='JOSM' than I'd like. Just 
because you're in a random bit of the Cotswolds doesn't mean that someone 
hasn't already mapped it!

> The problem with it being based on planet.osm is that you would still 
> get duplication because someone else may have uploaded segments since 
> the last time the planet.osm got produced.

With nightly dumps, that's less of a problem, but for now you'd really 
need to run it against the live API

Nick