Fiberoptic

The goal of this forum and community effort is to create a free map and routing application that is easy to install and use on many platforms The map and routing engine will be continuously updated by those connected to the Internet.

Why do navigation users need to pay 9$ a month for navigation or 50$ for stale map data that never gets updated? Car companies also charge hundred of dollars for built in navigation upgrades.

None of the current open source or paid offerings have these core features all in one package

• Free, Accurate, usable
• Easy to install package for use on low power mobile devices
• Passively, crowd source collected map data
• An algorithm to passively process the above and make it routable
• A routing algorithm to work with the above
• I am sure as the discussion continues we can clarify this problems list.

I will be moderating this forum with our new moderator, ChunkykS. Over the next week or so we hope to hear more ideas about how the rest of the community can help.

A good place to start reading is a blog post we did in late june of 2009 . There is also a video there explaining the difference between passive and active map generation.

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thekl0wn

Would it be possible to get just a bit more info? If nothing else, just the general direction of where all of this is heading? Is there something new in development or is the direction going towards using existing? (please forgive my blissful ignorance)

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Fiberoptic

Does this make sense? If not, what am I missing? This is a somewhat complicated topic.

I think a one page graphical explanation of how a navigation package works might be helpful:

• Map data source
• Compression
• Traffic speeds
• Road flow data
• How the routing engine uses the above
• more details on the vision behind real time updated maps and passive vs active data collection and processing. Do you think this point is covered in the teleatlas movie?

thekl0wn

That thread itself cleared up a lot. The video did a fairly good job with the basic explanation as well.

Was that thread always in this section? I've briefed through that thread before, but didn't remember it in this section. Or is my brain already on vacation?

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Fiberoptic

I moved it over yesterday. It was in the blogtalk section.

sbb_f1234

Well, i also think that a graphical explanation of how a navigation package works might be helpful, because it's more clear and easier for us to understand.

cataso

I depends on what you're trying to achieve. If its just mapping then lat, long and maybe altitude is all you need. The big thing seems to be how often you sample these points (currently once every 100 metres.)

If you're after traffic reports, as some suggested, then some kind of real time update and speed collection would be required. All doable in my app but adds complexity, cost and not much benefit until people are really using it.

Other important data is the street data, road names, numbers, speed limits etc. I have started research on this and will be coding once I've made the tracker robust and easy to use.

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