OSM Hack Weekend October 2024

Saturday, 26 October 2024 | Volker Krause

Last weekend I attended the bi-annual OSM Hack Weekend in Karlsruhe again, organized by Geofabrik and this time hosted at a nearby university building due to the large number of participants.

Transitous

My main focus has been getting the public transport client library used by KDE Itinerary ready for MOTIS v2, as Transitous, our community-run public transport routing service, will switch to that in the not too distant future.

One big new feature in MOTIS v2 is support for GTFS shapes. That is, getting detailed paths for public transport sections, beyond just positions of intermediate stops, which allows for a much more useful map display for example.

Even more importantly, MOTIS now also provides detailed multi-floor paths for transfers or other parts of a trip where you have to move yourself (walking, biking, etc). This is all based on OSM data and thus matches perfectly to the map data, but since practically no other backend provides this level of detail it also required a few changes in our data model and API.

Besides the new MOTIS API being much more intuitive than the previous one having had Felix from the MOTIS team around (even if just online) who instantly implemented all suggested improvements in the server made this super productive.

If your region isn’t covered by Transitous yet, check out the contributor documentation on how to change that.

Itinerary

For debugging parsing of paths provided by MOTIS I added a map view to the KPublicTransport demo app. That ended up getting close to what we’d need for a map view of an entire trip in Itinerary, so we also have that now. It’s not where I’d like it yet e.g. regarding interactivity and the look of bi-directional paths it’s a good start.

Map view showing tram and train paths as lines and pins marking hotels, event venues and restaurants. — Trip map view prototype in Itinerary.

A full trip map view was also one of the feature requests I got from other participants. Another suggestions that came up and that meanwhile has been implemented is pre-filling the stop location history with all locations involved in the current trip, which is quite helpful during trip planning.

Indoor Routing

Following a discussion on detailed mapping of hedges in outdoor mazes I learned there’s an OSM wiki page on that subject, which also lists a bunch of examples.

While I don’t really have any particular interest in outdoor mazes and/or fancy hedge art, these things just ask for being used as a test case for our indoor router.

Complex maze out of hedges, with a line showing a path through it. — Indoor router finding a way through a maze made out of hedges.

You can help!

Hack weekends how this is called in the OSM community or sprints as this is known in the KDE community are immensely valuable and productive. There’s a great deal of knowledge transfer happening, and they are a big motivational boost.

However, physical meetings incur costs, and that’s where your donations help! KDE e.V. and local OSM chapters like the FOSSGIS e.V. support these activities.