Ask HN: How is routing done on maps?

Re:Ask HN: How is routing done on maps? by rchiniquy on Wednesday February 18, 2009 @10:21AM (#485831)

Yeah, I wasn't sure what kind of answer you were looking for. OSM provides exports of the street data which gives you the ability to either:

A. Run a pre-existing routing program on it, such as http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Rana, or

B. Write your own (which would require knowledge of algorithms such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A*_search_algorithm)

There are also services where people do these things for you, and for low volume, they might not mind if you programmatically scrape their results. A good example is http://www.batchgeocode.com/

Properly, Rana isn't intended as a package for programmatic access, but it does include code which does what you want:

* http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/PyrouteLib - Pyroute is probably exactly what you want.

* Rana's routing module: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Rana/Modules#route

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Re:Ask HN: How is routing done on maps? by SingAlong on Wednesday February 18, 2009 @07:52PM (#486479)

I just tried Gosmore (found about it on the OSM wiki). installing it on my ubuntu seems to be a bit tricky, so I haven't yet installed it (some errors).

Rana and Pyroute sound cool to me since they are in PYthon. And the software requirements to run rana or Pyroute match my system (linux). So I'll choose one of those after trying both.

Thanks for the tip

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Re:Ask HN: How is routing done on maps? by rchiniquy on Thursday February 19, 2009 @11:24AM (#487432)

Sure thing. You may as well try Pyroute first, since the system requirements there are a subset of the Rana requirements (it doesn't require GTK or Cairo, etc).

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