[maemo-developers] Navigating on OSM data on maemo

[From: Simon Pickering]

>> The big issue at the moment is that the  
>> OSM data (which is what I'll be using at least as I don't have any  
>> Garmin maps for Navit) lack certain metadata which would be useful.  
>> The main thing here is the road speed, or some indicator of what the  
>> road speed might be (e.g. road type data - in town/country/etc.)
>
> currently you will have difficulties to determine if a way, for  
> example, is in
> a certain country or within a residential area. I guess it still will last a
> while until we have enough such data in our database.

There are probably some hacky ways around this in the absence of the  
actual data, avoiding a given radius around a town location (and  
perhaps even caching data on the population so we know what radius, or  
knowing the radius itself if this is available). Obviously bypasses  
will probably not work too well with this though. Hacky as I said ;)

> But does it matter right now? Some examples already show that   
> routing based on
> OSM data is possible, and that the results can copete with the results of
> commercial routers.

No, not really. We may as well get a handle on how to do routing at  
least. One thing that might be complimentary to the existing on-line  
routing methods is calculating tracks back to the existing route (e.g.  
if you stray or need to divert), in this case it wouldn't matter too  
much about the speed of the road as the distance wouldn't be too great.

> BTW: There's some discussion about standardizing a binary file format for
> mapping applications @OSM-dev ("Call to mobile developers: OSM binary file
> format"). No clue if it will be successful, but at least there's a wiki
> page :) :
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/OSM_Mobile_Binary_Format

Thanks, I'll take a look at that.

Cheers,


Simon