[OSM-talk] RoadMap development for OSM

[Ulf Lamping]

Paul Fox schrieb:
> hi -- forgive me for only lurking for a few days before diving
> in here.
>
> i'm the (current) maintainer of the "RoadMap" project
> (http://roadmap.sourceforge.net), an open source map rendering
> and navigation tool.  roadmap primarily deals with maps derived
> from the TIGER data, but we also have converters for the Canadian
> RNF (Road Network File) data, and the ancient and inaccurate DCW
> (Digital Charts of the World) data.  northern north america has
> been our focus, mainly because that's where the free data has
> been, and because that's where the developers live.
>   
As no one seemed to answer your mail (at least not on this list), I'm 
trying to shed some light here (not saying that I know a lot myself in 
this regard ;-)

Most of the people at OSM are doing mapping, the people actually doing 
the OSM development (servers, editors, ...) are pretty limited - so this 
problem is not only with RoadMap.


There are some attempts to "bring OSM data to the people":

- RoadNav (similiar to RoadMap?) had a function to download OSM data and 
rendered it with it's own functions (but at least 0.18 only supported 
the no longer working OSM API 0.3 - we're at API 0.5 already)
- gpsdrive (similiar to RoadMap?) next release will have a way to 
download OSM data and render it with mapnik (Linux only)
- there are attempts to bring pixmaps to garmin devices

There are certainly other projects like these and I don't know the 
current state of all this, sorry.


So in the end, the current OSM development in this area is very 
experimental, but most of the effort currently is focussed IMHO still on 
the collection of data.

To my experience, you'll need to do a lot of things yourself and don't 
expect that any change requests will be implemented (some because they 
don't fit into the current implementation but most just because the 
developers don't have the time) - there's a lot of stuff that needs to 
be done and the developers already know it.

However, things are going slowly, but they are going on. For example: 
driving directions "turn left only" (which is a must for routing) were 
not really possible without the API 0.5 changes which was introduced 
some weeks ago.

Regards, ULFL

P.S: I personally would love to see an Open Source Navigation Software 
based on OSM data (preferably on Windows) - basically to experiment 
where we need further improvements in the OSM data (IMO driving 
directions is only one aspect that we need for a good routing software)