The end of the Summer – let there be Summer!

Although there are still a couple of days left until the official Pencils Down date of the Summer of Code, I am now officially putting my pencil down because I need to catch a train to Adelaide tomorrow morning.
I guess this really marks the end of my student period; even though I graduated in June, this project allowed me to feel like a student just a little longer. Sniff, now I really have to enter the big scary adult world.
But first I will go on a trip for two weeks to see Adelaide, the Ghan train, Darwin and Kakadu National park. It will be a very culturally diverse trip; from what I have  heard, Adelaide and Darwin are pretty much as different as it gets here in Australia.

Route profile demo by Lambertus
Route profile demo by Lambertus

I am very happy to see that my application has found its way to an actual route planner website (see figure above)!
So what is next? Well, I will obviously have much less time to work on this project, so my highest priority will be to explain other people how to use and improve the application and how to install it on their own server. So don’t hesitate to mail me about that!
I have to keep this post short because I still have to pack some stuff and it is already late. But I do want  to thank some people of course. Thanks Google for sponsoring me (and for creating all sorts of cool and useful tools for my project). Thanks OpenStreetMap community for selecting my project, your confidence in me and your support. And of course, thanks Artem for mentoring me during the project and for being a great and interesting person to talk to in general!
These are just thankyou’s, not goodbyes. So see you soon!

5 comments

  1. What a coincidence!
    Hi, I just discovered your blog. Funny enough, your thing is almost exactly the same to the one I am doing. I mean, I think it is. I read that you use SRTM3 and based on it generate the approximate altitude profile of given route calculated from OSM data. Please let me know if there are some other functionalities you have added, so I do not multiply the work done.
    My idea is to use SRTM data to adjust the weights on the road network graph so I can use it to generate route, which would be quite useful for cyclists.
    I hope you could advice me on how to make an interpolation of SRTM on given route, so I will not reinvent the wheel.
    Thanx
    Jacek

  2. Hi Yatzek,
    Thanks for reply! I have not had time to continue work on this project so far, so anything you find is the most up to date information.
    The most important places to find out more:
    My blog entries about the project:
    http://sprovoost.nl/category/gsoc/
    The OpenStreetMap wiki:
    http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Route_altitude_profiles_SRTM
    To answer your questions:
    I am indeed using SRTM3 data.
    I am glad to hear that you want to use SRTM data to improve routing; I have not done any routing myself and as far as I know nobody has incorporated elevation ‘challenge’ in their routes. At least no open source (bike route) planners.
    Keep in mind though that when you apply weights, they are path dependent. For example, it is easier to go down and then up, then to go up and then down. So how hard a certain elevation change is, depends (partially) on the rest of the route.
    I interpolated with bilinear interpolation:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilinear_interpolation
    I hope the code make sense. But feel free to email me with questions!
    Cheers,
    Sjors

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *