{"id":1320,"date":"2010-05-08T18:28:34","date_gmt":"2010-05-08T18:28:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1320"},"modified":"2010-05-08T18:39:42","modified_gmt":"2010-05-08T18:39:42","slug":"getting-free-routing-data-for-the-uk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/?p=1320","title":{"rendered":"Getting free routing data for the UK"},"content":{"rendered":"

I wrote this week about my new Android app<\/a>, which checks for road traffic problems affecting UK routes. I mentioned that it wasn’t ready for release yet, because there are a few admin issues that I need to sort. <\/p>\n

One of the problems is in how I get the routing data. <\/p>\n

The app relies on comparing the locations of traffic problems with the user’s route. <\/p>\n

Getting the location of traffic problems isn’t too hard as there are feeds from the Highways Agency<\/a> and the BBC<\/a> that offer that.<\/p>\n

But getting a detailed description of a route between two places, in a format that I can use to compare against the traffic problems, proved harder. <\/p>\n

I tried a few places, such as:<\/p>\n

native Android API<\/a>
\nThere is a maps and geolocation API in Android, but it doesn’t include any routing abilities. (I found a couple of forum posts that suggest that there used to be, but they were removed?<\/em>)<\/p>\n

Google Maps API<\/a>
\nI found the documentation for Google’s APIs quite obtuse. I couldn’t find a REST or HTTP API<\/a> for calculating routes. The JavaScript API doesn’t look like it returns information in quite the format I require, and I couldn’t see a straightforward way of accessing it from an Android Java client. I might have to come back to this, though!<\/p>\n

Multimap Open API<\/a>
\nThey have an API that would be ideal for my purposes – technically, the closest fit for my needs for a few boring technical reasons. But the terms of use say that it “may not be used as part of a mobile or wireless service”. Damn. <\/p>\n

CloudMade<\/a>
\nThey have a good routing API, and this is the one that the app currently uses. But, my free API key limits me to making 5000 requests per month. That’s not 5000 requests per user – it’s 5000 requests in total for all users of my app. If I want more, I’d have to pay. This might be enough… I’m not sure. It’d depend on how many users I end up with. <\/p>\n

That said, their developer site does say “If you are doing something really cool and you absolutely need more access to these services please get in touch \u00e2\u20ac\u201c we want to help your innovation”. I’ve emailed them to ask. I wonder if they would think my app is really cool? \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

Watch this space.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I wrote this week about my new Android app, which checks for road traffic problems affecting UK routes. I mentioned that it wasn’t ready for release yet, because there are a few admin issues that I need to sort. One of the problems is in how I get the routing data. The app relies on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[353,384,158,455,137,454,457,256,456],"class_list":["post-1320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-code","tag-cloudmade","tag-geolocation","tag-google","tag-googlemaps","tag-location","tag-map","tag-multimap","tag-openstreetmap","tag-routing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1320"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1320\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dalelane.co.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}