GraphHopper 2015

This year goes to an end and it was an exciting year for us, our users and customers. In this blog post we summarize all GraphHopper related activities and wish you happy holidays!

GraphHopper Community

With the help of our community we’ve now several new features and already over 35 translations! We moved our mailing list to a discourse based forum and now have dozens of posts every week into roughly 7 categories with one dedicated for translators.

The year started with the addition of routing to the OSM main page which got a good media coverage like in Heise. We are happy to be one of the early choices then and still provide routing to the OSM community! One amazing community contribution was a customizable router based on GraphHopper called uRoute (works best in chromium) created from CS students of the University of Nottingham including a nice video:

Furthermore there was a bike trip to Paris planned with GraphHopper to raise more awareness for the climate change, especially important these days as demonstrations in Paris are forbidden.

There are now at least 4 offline routing applications using GraphHopper: Pocket Maps which is also open source, a Locus-Addon, Alminav and the Cruiser app. And therefor our use cases list got longer. And very recently we added VSimRTI which is a simulation and assessment framework for autonomous, cooperative, and electric driving, developed by Daimler Center for Automotive Information Technology Innovations and Fraunhofer FOKUS.

Map tiles for GraphHopper Maps are served from Omniscale – we had to say “Goodbye” to Lyrk as the default tiles due to its shutdown.

Last but not least: we are looking for someone willing to create on a regular basis and host GraphHopper&Mapsforge files for the Android demo – contact us!

GraphHopper Directions API got Route Optimization

GraphHopper and the jsprit project joined forces and so we were able to release the very fast GraphHopper Route Optimization API in November as beta. It includes a route editor for developers as well as a simple optimizing capability of the Routing API.

Besides adding the Route Optimization API we’ve improved our Geocoding API and added several new vehicle profiles to the Routing and Matrix API. Furthermore the GraphHopper project won one of the 5 precious main prices of the founder competition IKT Innovativ.

 GraphHopper Releases

We released two new stable versions leading to a better, more memory efficient and production grade routing engine. Version 0.4 included the release of the new map matching component, this got some attention from heise.de. The map matching is now also usable as a web API in the lastest master branch. A German article about version 0.4 is available and you cannot only try it online but also offline in the browser via TeaVM. Version 0.5 finally made it possible to use multiple profiles in the “speed mode” aka routing via “Contraction Hierarchies”.

We thank again our many contributors, sponsors and translators! Of course, all of this would not be possible without OpenStreetMap – thank you!

Roads to Rome and Pubs in Dublin

The most popular blog post were the Roads to Rome project from Moovel lab and visiting all pubs in Dublin. The roads to Rome project was so demanding that people on Twitter got irritated by it ;). We were very happy that our friends at Moovel got into many online magazines like Wired and we were mentioned too. The project about visiting all pubs in Dublin was then also presented from Stefan at WhereCamp 2015 – get the slides here.

What’s next? 2016!

That was a really nice and exciting year and the next year won’t stand behind – we already know that 🙂 ! Keep an eye on all GraphHoppers!