I am currently researching about automatic map generation from GPS traces.
For testing my algorithms I need GPS data and have found that OSM can provide me with those (through JOSM and its API). The problem I am facing though is that those tracks include all sorts of travelling, e.g. cycling, driving, walking, which means that essentially all the area I have downloaded is covered by traces. Of course that’s not a good starting point for automatically finding routes.
What I am after is a way to select only the (car) driving traces. Since that’s probably not an easy task I have thought that the easiest way might be to get preselected traces. Wasn’t there once a Romanian company donating their truck fleet’s GPS data to the OSM community? Could I download those data from somewhere by any chance?
Some traces have tags. So you could just use any traces tagged as “car”. eg see this list: http://www.openstreetmap.org/traces/tag/car
Though I’m not sure if there’s any way to just download or filter traces with a particular tag, I don’t know if JOSM can do this.
Also, many traces are not tagged. And tag names are not fixed - some might be tagged as “car” or “driving” or “drive” etc.
I think you can only see the tags if a trace is set as “identifiable”.
Why not just filter by speed? If any given trace has a maximum speed between 40kmh and, say, 150kmh (to strip out the traces with obvious jump-errors - or crazy bikers), then it’s probably a motor vehicle and you can use the entire trace, slow parts and all. You may exclude a few grannies and include a few Olympic athletes training for some bicycle race but that shouldn’t matter too much. It might take a bit of fine-tuning to get the right speed range, but otherwise it’s pretty easy to implement.