Hi–
For a research project designed to optimize fuel consumption, I need to incorporate a road map and road elevation data into my program. I think OSM is just right for this, but am having a little trouble getting started. I’m hoping that someone can steer me in the right direction for how best to do this.
As a first step, what I am looking specifically to do is:
- Be able to identify all roads within a certain neighborhood (e.g. radius) of a given location
- Be able to identify which of the above roads intersect
- Do all this automatically, from some kind of C, Java, Fortran, etc. program that can run on a microcontroller or DSP
- It must be open source, or at least have a free license.
I’m having a terrible time doing this, mostly because I’m just getting started into GIS. It should be a very easy question to answer, and it seems that any kind of GPS router can do this very easily and quickly. I’ve been staring at shapefiles, though, and don’t really see how this could be done. Someone, somewhere mentioned a shp database, but I’m fuzzy on what this could be and how I could use it.
I imagine that this should look something like a database where I query a specific “Road” and “section” and have it return all intersecting entries. For instance, every section of a road-- with the exception of dead ends-- would intersect with at least two other sections: the one immediately before and the one immediately after.
Right now, I don’t need to know the names and non-physical characteristics of roads and intersections. I just need to know where they are and what their orientation in space is.
Lastly, on a side note I’m interested in improving the OSM altitude references. I believe that our experiment will, as a side effect, allow us to greatly increase the altitude accuracy for certain roads, but am unsure how to incorporate this into OSM. Honestly, until our process is peer validated, we should not risk contaminating the official sources. However, it would be a shame not to be able to use the data just because there might be some bugs, especially since the SRTM data is so coarse for anything outside the US. I was thinking that this might play into the above question, as if there is a database format for roads and their intersections, it should be easy to add an extra altitude field.
Of course, maybe I’m just barking up the wrong tree. This is a serious research project, so any help, no matter how obscure, is welcome, especially paper links and references.
[edited to update opensource and C requirements]