Another has year passed, and another year is appearing over the horizon! Yesterday was the winter solstice up here in the Northern Hemisphere, meaning that finally the days start getting longer. It also means the the holiday period and celebrations for bringing in the new year are getting into full swing.
Over the past year, a large chunk of the development for openrouteservice has been getting our core code base updated to use a newer version of the GraphHopper core routing system. The end of this massive update is in sight, and early next year you can expect the next major release of openrouteservice where this new and updated code will be available for use.
We have also seen a number of releases made of the openrouteservice routing engine which have covered topics such as bug fixing, adding additional functionality (flexible matrix, ability to use traffic data in reachability calculations), and adding new languages (including Romanian and Esperanto).
Projects such as HEAL have continued, with custom functionality being developed which will make it’s way into the core openrouteservice code base when the projects come to an end and the feasibility of such functionality is proven.
As well as the software development side of openrouteservice, over the year there have also been a number of scientific publications making use of openrouteservice. One key publication produced through collaboration with the GIScience group at Universität Heidelberg was reporting the findings of the SocialMedia2Traffic project, which aimed at deriving a freely available traffic dataset based on social media data:
Zia, M., Fürle, J., Ludwig, C., Lautenbach, S., Gumbrich, S., & Zipf, A. (2022). SocialMedia2Traffic: Derivation of Traffic Information from Social Media Data. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 11(9), 482. DOI: 10.3390/ijgi11090482
So, bringing the year to an end, everyone here working on openrouteservice wish you all a happy and healthy holiday period, and let’s look forward to what comes next in 2023!