Hello OSM developers, I am a computer scientist researcher at the University of Memphis Computer Science Dept. In a recent project, we needed a representation of the road network which would provide us with information about connectivity and distance between sections of road. We found that the OSM data provided a suitable platform to build such a graph-like structure. I have written a java program to process the XML format OSM data and achieve this. Currently, each sequential pair of nodes referenced in the WAY elements of roads are considered as a section of road. their lat/long coords are passed to a method to calculate their distance via law of spherical cosines and haversine formula. After every Way in the dataset is processed, another method populates adjacency and incidence information. Each "road section" (essentially a graph edge) knows which road sections it is adjacent to, the two node points that make its end points, its distance, it's heading (in respect to North) and its street name. Thus far we are not very concerned with other metadata but it's certainly feasible n possible to include. Further, each node (essentially a graph vertex) knows its reference number, its lat/lng coords, and all of the road sections which are incident to it. The purpose of this structure for us was to serve as a state model for simulations for our research work. While I'm not at liberty to share all of our research purposes at this time, I am however able to share the code I wrote which processes the osm data and creates a graph structure of the road network. The first version simply instantiates and populates several java objects, which we tried to design and code as clean and efficiently as possible. We are now migrating the processor to instead store the data in a MySQL database. So, I am writing the mailing list to ask if the osm developer community would find any use for this little utility which creates a connected graph structure of Ways, either as a straightforward set of java objects or as a MySQL database. OSM has benefited our research and I would certainly like to give back.
Thanks, Daniel _______________________________________________ dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/dev
