So, 2020 has definitely been a different and difficult year for many people. We’ve seen huge forest fires, political turmoil and protests, and a global pandemic that has drastically changed our day to day lives. But this post isn’t about all of those bad things, it’s about some good things (at least from the openrouteservice anyway). As the year draws to an end, we thought we would share with you a roundup of some of the new features that have been released in openrouteservice this year:
- you can produce long distance routes with restrictions very quickly thanks to the Core-ALT algorithm
- trips don’t need to have a start and end location - you can also now request round trip routes
- When you request a route, you can also ask for some alternative routes which are a little different from the optimal one
- you can specify the maximum speed that you can travel at
- we have added new translations including Polish
- new methods have been added to the isochrones building that means you can get country wide isochrones (though not yet in our public API)
As well as these released features, there has also been a lot of work put into some upcoming functionalites which we are planning to release over the next year. These include:
- the ability to include traffic data when building graphs so that traffic patterns can be taken into account when creating routes and isochrones
- integration of time dependent routing so that temporal restrictions can be taken into account based on when you are planning to travel
- the integration of results from the MeinGrün project at GIScience Heidelberg to provide more options for healthy pedestrian routing
- release of a brand new maps client that is mobile friendly
There have also been a lot of “behind the scenes” updates this year, such as moving to newer and faster servers, updates of our core code, book chapter publications, and lots of new projects with third parties.
So, though this year has certainly been a challenge with rapidly changing circumstances, we hope that we have still been able to deliver new features in a routing service that suites your needs.
All that is left to say is that the openrouteservice team wishes you all a happy holiday period, and as they say in Germany, einen guten Rutsch ins neue Jahr!