Hi-- (I posted something similar tothe forum, http://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=2444. A reply suggested I try here, too.)
I am a controls researcher at the University of Luxembourg, and am trying to incorporate map data into a research project on fuel economy optimization. Our needs are actually quite simple, so I'm hoping to be able to sandwich everything into a tiny, low-cost (emphasis on low-cost) package. We need to: 1) Identify *all* roads within a certain neighborhood (e.g. radius) of a given location 2) Identify which of the above roads intersect 3) Do all this automatically, from some kind of C, Java, Fortran, etc. program that can run on a microcontroller or DSP 4) Run this locally, without a data connection 5) It must be open source, or at least have a free license. We don't need to: 1) write data. Read-only is all we're looking for 2) efficiently access large data sets (a 100mx15m bounding box should be enough) 3) access POI or anything else other than roads. 4) create routes Playing around with the OSM API, it seems to me that it should work for most, if not all, of these needs. I am able to download an XML file containing all OSM data in a given bounding box. Looking at this data, I see that there are <nd reference=...> sections they list the intersections with other roads and sections. Perhaps I should think of these more as nodes than intersections, but I haven't gotten that far yet in understanding what the results mean. In any case, it seems to me logical that I should be able to find connecting roads. (Please correct me if I'm wrong!) Once I have the connecting roads, I should be able to retrieve the associated nodes and calculate 2D layout and positions of the roads. As I gather from the wiki, I can even download the entire planet.osm file along with the API, so I don't see what would prevent me from writing a C program, shell script, etc... that automates this process. So, assuming that the above is all correct, and that OSM API fulfills my needs, what is the smallest platform I can run it on? Speed and efficiency are not important, only cost and size. Is there any provision for an ultra-light read-only API that can be included in a C program? Given the marginal requirements, in a sense I can't see why a small 8-bit microcontroller shouldn't be able to perform a database lookup. Perhaps I'm thinking at this the wrong way, though, as I'm very new to OSM, GIS, databases, etc... If any of you have experience getting this to run on an embedded platform, and could link to code and/or websites, that would be a bonus! Cheers, Kenn Sebesta _______________________________________________ dev mailing list dev@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
