[OSM-talk] Why quality is more important than routing speed

[Frederik Ramm]

Nic,

Nic Roets wrote:
> There is a lot of talk around better algorithms (e.g. contraction
> hierarchies), distributed routing, stress tests etc. So I'm going to
> put in into perspective with a few calculations.
> 
> For a 40km journey, Gosmore takes 50ms*. 

It's all a question of user experience. Of course if I want to plan a 
route it is not a big deal if I have to wait 50ms or even a few seconds.

However if you have a fast service you can switch over to a more 
interactive way of route planning (think Google's UI where you grab a 
via point and drag it and get a new route instantly, even while 
dragging; or where it computes a number of routes for you initially 
instead of just one). This is also an aspect of quality, and allows the 
user to find a better route.

Quality is not just how many tags you support, although in a rich 
environment like OSM it is of course desirable to use as much 
information from the data as possible.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"