Mapumental really does rock and I can’t wait for it to come out of beta (and perhaps have more functionality such as dual centres, more specific house price data etc).

Any idea when that will be?

Thanks very much

Tony

One of those is a contour rendering tile layer which will have the facility to manage many such layers. So for a new version of data, we can make a new layer with a new date, then flip the application to use it.

So yes, you have to plan for updates to the original data!

how do you plan to keep information updated? For example I imagine with additional funding, some places have the potential to become much more picturesque, others to go downhill. It’s an issue I’m grappling with myself at th emoment because I’m hoping to create a visual way to understand services for parents and disabled people by location, however my struggle at the moment is how to collect, but also maintain this information which seems to change frequently!

We do have a currently-undocumented XML interface to the planner which could be used, but the number of queries you would be sending would collapse our single server :) It’s on our to-do and strategy lists to make a formal API.

We plan to open-source the CycleStreets code in due course (there’s a lot of refactoring still going on, and audits needed first). Once that’s done I imagine you should then be able to install a local instance and fire away your own queries.

However, I suspect it will still be too slow though, because the engine is necessarily optimised for detailed street results rather than an overall rough time/distance result. I do wonder whether a more general-purpose road router would approximate sufficiently though.

It’s definitely an area which would be interesting to collaborate on though. (Time in particular is the main issue at present!)

We use a special route finding algorithm to generate all the routes, but probably not that bad to code on top of the cyclestreets systems. We’re generalising everything so it is in separate components so will be easier to add soon.

Do you know the cyclestreets codebase, and have access to their data? If you can get that now, then will be in a good position to integrate with mapumental later.

This is really beautiful and useful mapping! Nice one.

One question/suggestion – how about applying this to cycling? The (also Cambridge-based) guys over at http://www.CycleStreets.net are doing a fine job on using the OpenCycleMap network to apply routing algorithms, and there are an awful lot of people in the country who’d love a “find me a place to live where I could cycle to work” – especially if (as cyclestreets do) it’s not distance based but based on quietness and the national cycle network.

I’d be interested in lending a hand if you’re keen on that…

Cheers
Simon

We’re currently working on changes to make it scale well so it can come out of beta, but it’ll be a while before its ready I’m afraid.

We’ll use the invites to help test as we change things for that.

I’m planning on trying both nginx and Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancer to see if they do better.