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Organic maps: Experimental feed based public transport mapping

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Re: Organic maps: Experimental feed based public transport mapping

#21

Post by notpushkin »

maelito wrote: post #18
notpushkin wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Organic Maps have very beautiful transit lines representation in the style of Transit app's great work. I've just opened up Chicago in Organic Maps and it isn't anything like Transit app: https://u.ale.sh/omaps-chicago-loop.jpg It works great for simpler transit systems, but certainly there’s some room for improvement!

Not sure about your harsh comparison. Organic's version is less of a rectangle, but is very lisible as well.

I mean yeah, it is quite good already! But sometimes lines break on stations (see e.g. the green and brown lines on Clark/Lake) and there are some unnecessary intersections (e.g. pink and purple on Washington/Wells – can be avoided by swapping them in in the line “bundle”).

Solving these problems would make the map not just prettier, but also easier to read and understand. Of course, doing this by hand isn't really feasible on Organic’s / OSM’s scale, but the blog post you linked is pretty much a how-to guide that can be implemented in code. I’d love to work on something like that, but don’t really know where to start.

Re: Organic maps: Experimental feed based public transport mapping

#22

Post by dikkechill »

maelito wrote: post #3

The document doesn't say which routing engine is used. I'm currently integrating Motis on a similar initiative (a french open source Web map, https://cartes.app ). More is needed to provide a full transit map experience, but Motis does the essential part. We're not far from transit calculation as an open source commodity in countries that publish their transit data as GTFS. E.g. in France there is a whole team called…

Thanks for bringing this up to hackernews! The challenge for OrganicMaps is to make it privacy preserving and offline usable, which means on device routing and getting as much information on the device as possible.

The referred document concerns the existing static part, it's a rather cumbersome to build it yourself at the moment. There is some routing logic in the app - I think from the Maps.me time - but currently disabled. The idea is to redesign this - in the mentioned ticket - and divide it in static (e.g. stops, routes) and 'live' data (e.g. schedule changes). It requires an efficient infrastructure. It's all volunteer driven. If you want to help, feel free to contribute!

Re: Organic maps: Experimental feed based public transport mapping

#23

Post by dikkechill »

denysvitali wrote: post #10
alsodumb wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think routing is that resource intensive, especially in transit setting where there are set number of stops (nodes) and the graph is fairly static - we can do tons of preprocessing and then routing queries would have minimal computational overhead.

I did implement an A* routing "offline" routing algorithm based on GTFS data + walking paths (OptiTravel) and built a GTFS server (to easily serve the data, do geospatial queries, ...) a few years ago. Granted that this was a university project, for some cities the calculation was rather intensive (e.g: London). I might be wrong though. [1]: https://github.com/denysvitali/optitravel [2]: https://github.com/denysvital…

Cool projects! I actually had a look at you gtfs-server, to use Rust for processing GTFS files. Processing GTFS (basically large zipped text files) is quite resource intensive indeed, especially if you want to do it for the whole planet. What would you do differently now?

Re: Organic maps: Experimental feed based public transport mapping

#24

Post by AlexTrask »

bmicraft wrote: post #20
mFixman wrote: post #19

Does anybody know if there's an Organic Maps equivalent for cycling? OSM has a lot of data that's only available in everything-maps like OsmAnd, such as location of bicycle parking spaces or quality of cycle lanes. It would be nice to have it in a nicer interface than that app. I'm currently building a bike + public transit directions engine (bringing your bike on the train). I'm surprised that this doesn't exist yet…

Organic Maps does include bicycle parking POIs. Also some local transit apps do have bike+train routing options for bike carriage and bike sharing: https://anachb.vor.at/ I agree though that something like this is missing in the offline-first maps space.

It also includes an elevation layer that can be useful while biking

Re: Organic maps: Experimental feed based public transport mapping

#26

Post by dikkechill »

carom wrote: post #11

While I don't use Organic Maps as my daily driver because there is no traffic data, it has been invaluable to have on my phone. It is one of the best offline and trail maps I've used.

That's a much requested feature. With imho two main challenges:

1. Much traffic data is private / requires licensing, however some countries have reasonable public data. For example the TraffXML (https://gitlab.com/traffxml) project has some.

2. The project is free to use, but also volunteer driven. It requires setting up a privacy preserving "live data" infrastructure.

If you think this is a nice challenge and you can help, feel free to reach out!

https://github.com/organicmaps/organicmaps/issues/1160 would be a good starting point.

Re: Organic maps: Experimental feed based public transport mapping

#27

Post by ks2048 »

Off-topic to the public transit news, but: I've enjoyed Organic Maps for years, but it seems they made a change within the past year (maybe 3-4 months ago) that slowed everything down. Anyone know what happened? It used to be very responsive, but now one a new area, it can take second or two to update.

Re: Organic maps: Experimental feed based public transport mapping

#28

Post by dijital »

dikkechill wrote: post #22
maelito wrote: post #3

The document doesn't say which routing engine is used. I'm currently integrating Motis on a similar initiative (a french open source Web map, https://cartes.app ). More is needed to provide a full transit map experience, but Motis does the essential part. We're not far from transit calculation as an open source commodity in countries that publish their transit data as GTFS. E.g. in France there is a whole team called…

Thanks for bringing this up to hackernews! The challenge for OrganicMaps is to make it privacy preserving and offline usable, which means on device routing and getting as much information on the device as possible. The referred document concerns the existing static part, it's a rather cumbersome to build it yourself at the moment. There is some routing logic in the app - I think from the Maps.me time - but currently…

It seems like the serverside resource requirements to help with the privacy preserving aspect (and also to avoid DDoSing the data providers) would be non-trivial for a FOSS project like this.

I was wondering if a torrent-based architecture, where clients share updates with each other would help reduce the load. Any idea if it's been considered or would it just overcomplicate it for the number of clients involved and/or the latency for updates be too much to be of use?

Re: Organic maps: Experimental feed based public transport mapping

#29

Post by maelito »

dikkechill wrote: post #22
maelito wrote: post #3

The document doesn't say which routing engine is used. I'm currently integrating Motis on a similar initiative (a french open source Web map, https://cartes.app ). More is needed to provide a full transit map experience, but Motis does the essential part. We're not far from transit calculation as an open source commodity in countries that publish their transit data as GTFS. E.g. in France there is a whole team called…

Thanks for bringing this up to hackernews! The challenge for OrganicMaps is to make it privacy preserving and offline usable, which means on device routing and getting as much information on the device as possible. The referred document concerns the existing static part, it's a rather cumbersome to build it yourself at the moment. There is some routing logic in the app - I think from the Maps.me time - but currently…

I'm building a server to produce plans and a GTFS API https://github.com/laem/gtfs

Cartes.app is quite like an Organic Maps for the Web. So I don't have any of the offline limitations that you have, but feel free to explore the code if anything looks interesting. The development is in french but the code is mostly in english.

Re: Organic maps: Experimental feed based public transport mapping

#30

Post by maelito »

mFixman wrote: post #19

Does anybody know if there's an Organic Maps equivalent for cycling? OSM has a lot of data that's only available in everything-maps like OsmAnd, such as location of bicycle parking spaces or quality of cycle lanes. It would be nice to have it in a nicer interface than that app. I'm currently building a bike + public transit directions engine (bringing your bike on the train). I'm surprised that this doesn't exist yet…

> I'm currently building a bike + public transit directions engine (bringing your bike on the train). I'm surprised that this doesn't exist yet; it's my favourite way to get around!

Care to share a link ? What does it provide compared to Motis's multimodal capabilities ?

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