Openrouteservice Europa (v9)

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Europa
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image source: The Commons - NASA/JPL-Caltech/SETI Institute - original at Europa | The puzzling, fascinating surface of Jupiter's icy … | Flickr

We are proud to announce the release of openrouteservice version 9.0.0, codename “Europa”. In this relesae there are a number of new features that make running your own instance a whole lot easier, and some changes that improve the general routing results.

For our API users, this release will not mean much, as just a few small things have changed

  • :ukraine: Ukrainian translation is now available
  • :radioactive: handling of roads restricted for the transport of hazardous materials has been improved
  • :bug: minor bugs have been addressed

As usual, all changes can be found in our CHANGELOG.md.

For everybody running their own openrouteservice instance, however, there are a bunch of integral changes:

  • Introducing a reworked run- and build-time config:
    We introduced new configuration properties:
    *.build and .service now make it clear which properties affect graph building and which are relevant for running the service to answer API requests.

    Depending on your use case, you can completely omit *.build or *.service, depending on whether you are building graphs or just want to run the API.

  • Create individually configured routing profiles:
    You can now host several individually configured routing profiles using the same openrouteservice-instance. This makes it possible to run two car profiles on the same instance, for example one with planet-wide large isochrones and one with country-wide traffic data, or to host graphs for different geographical regions on the same instance.

    Profile defaults that shall apply to all configured profiles are now set using the profile_default property. If different values are needed for individual profiles, these can then be overwritten for each profile in its properties. A value doesn’t have to exist in the profile_default - it can also be exclusively set for a single profile.

    All properties not set by the user will get sensible defaults applied. These can be found in the default config file.

  • Re-structure /status -endpoint:
    The structure and information in the /status endpoint have changed. If you are using the /status endpoint, be sure to check the documentation.

  • Pre-built graphs for openrouteservice
    And now for what we think is the most interesting feature of the new release…
    Running a planet-wide openrouteservice instance on your 8GB-RAM laptop, with up-to-date graphs for all profiles sounds impossible to you? Make sure to read further!

    With version 8, we enabled openrouteservice to run graphs on low-spec machines using Memory Mapping, effectively allowing planet-wide instances with as little as 6 GB of RAM.

    With Version 9, we introduce the “Graph Repository Client” into openrouteservice, the next step in the journey.

    Openrouteservice can now check remote repositories for pre-built graphs, based on your local configuration. If (new) graphs are available, openrouteservice downloads and reloads the graphs ad-hoc on a running instance, without increasing RAM usage.
    Checking and restarting for new data can either happen manually or on scheduled intervals.

Long build-times and high hardware demands during graph building have been a big hurdle for running openrouteservice. Especially for our humanitarian partners, quick, effortless and resource-friendly access to large graphs is essential.

We plan to provide pre-built graphs for certain routing profiles and geographical regions and make them available via the HeiGIT graph repository. Until then, the graph repository functionality is only available to selected partners and internal usage.

If you are already a collaborative user and interested in joining an early test phase, please re-apply to your collaborative status and leave a note that you would like to test it out.

While this feature will be available to the public at some point, the rollout will happen for our collaborative users first. So, make sure to apply for your free collaborative status if you didn’t already, and you use us in a humanitarian, social or research context.

We will let you know once we start offering this feature.

Europa

The smallest of the four galilean moons of Jupiter is one of the brightest icy moons - and the smoothest known object in the solar system. It is proposed that under its kilometer-thick ice surface there is a huge ocean, covering the whole planet. This makes it one of the key candidates for finding “alien” life, as it could be a great home for microbial life forms.
Although it shares a name with an earthly continent, neither name stems from the other, since both are named after the figure “Europa” from greek mythology, lover to Zeus.

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