Alongside with my friends I am about to develop an android application. The application will use maps a lot, finding routes, placing markers, drawing predefined routes, stuff like that.
There is this Google Maps APIv2. So I tried it, write some code and looks good. I am able to place markers and draw polylines, however my application will have some predefined routes. One route is set of LatLng points. So I just add these points to PolylineOptions and add it to map. Great, it works.
But these predefined routes will be created in web-based application also using Google Maps APIv2 or similar api/library. Some streets are not straight they are curved so you need to create a lot of LatLng points to get it look nice which is very important. I can do this but I want to put only two LatLng points - at the beginning of the street and at the end.
Here is the image:
On the left, route has only two LatLng points (red dots) and that is desired shape of line. On the right same route with 2 LatLng points gives me route coloured in light blue, and this is what actually happens if I just add polyline to GoogleMap object. In order to create same effect as in left image, I need to create many LatLng (red dots) points which is not appropriate for those who will create these routes. So this leads us to routing problem which can be solved by using Google Directions API. Which solves the problem of drawing routes with less markers. Basically what I understood, this API for directions actually creates a lot of these LatLng points that I draw using for-each loop as seen on right part of picture above. And I need to contact Google Web Service for this so I need to have Internet connection - and this is the problem.
Sometimes internet will not be available hence I need some alternative solution. I've heard of Open Street Maps, but I am not sure how to use it and does it needs internet connection for creating these routes.
Is there any free library that offers offline routing and showing maps offline? Basically all map interactions must be done without use of internet.
But it is understandable if internet connection is needed only for the first run of application as it is needed for Google Maps APIv2, well application crashes until I turn on internet, after which any next run I do not need internet..
A web based application will be made for creating these routes and routes will be created by users for whom we develop this application. And as users can be very annoying they will demand some user-friendly and easy interface for creating routes. Telling them that they need to create 100 to 500 points for each route, and if there is 60-70 routes they will gladly say NO to our application.
Any advice? If it is possible, I can write my own routing algorithm for Google Maps to work offline, I am very skilful at "Algorithms and Data Structures" - any guides/tutorials for this? But I guess this map is just set of tiles, and does not have necessary information for finding route.... So please correct If I am mistaken for anything.
You can use the Scout SDK (provides a free usage quota) as it offers full offline maps, routing & navigation.
Have a look into the open source projects GraphHopper, Mapsforge and OpenScience-VTM which can do routing and/or maps offline. And all use OpenStreetMap data. Other projects exists of course, have a look here and here.
Also have a look into the GraphHopper map matching component which could be interesting for your specific use case and can work offline too.
(Note I'm the author of GraphHopper)
If it is possible, I can write my own routing algorithm for Google Maps to work offline
No you can't, the data is not open nor you can buy the data to my knowledge.
Another option is OsmAnd. The OSM wiki also has some information about OsmAnd and even more information about OSM on Android in general as well as pages about rendering and routing.
Related
I want to develop an app that works with offline maps, and I need to be able to :
Geocode
Route between two coordinates
Calculate distance between two coordinates
Search places with autocomplete
So these are pretty difficult tasks since they all must work offline. I have found many Apis, like MapsMe, or MapsForge, all saying that they are based on the osm library. So does this mean that I should be able to "mix" these apis and make them work on a single map ?
For example: use the nice map of MapsMe and the routing system of MapsForge on the same map
Thanks
Anything is possible.
That said, they all may use the same source data (open street maps) but osmdroid and mapsforge pre-process them differently. Osmdroid normally only displays prerendered tiles either via a server or using mapsforge. Osm Bonus Pack adds routing using online sources (and only online sources).
Mapsforge preprocesses the osm data into an intermediate database format. Tiles are then rendered on device, on demand. POI info, as far as I've been able to determine, requires another separate database. The last I checked, they didn't have any routing capability but were working on getting POI information into their intermediate database format. Best place for info related to this is the mapsforge github site.
Calculating the straight line distance between two points is trivial and doesn't require any map engine. It's just math. Distance along a route is also straight map, so long as you have the set of points. Don't forget the factor in the earths curvature.
Geocoding, converting a lat/lon to an approximate or exact address and going back again can be done with the osm data, but I'm not aware of anything can do this offline, for the entire planet.
You'll also have to take consideration for the geographic area. osm data is huge, around 40gb for the planet, compressed. Obviously, you'll need to subset the data somehow.
I need to implement a map for a shopping mall in my app. This map needs to have a way to visually mark the fastest path to go from one place to another.
I currently have two options in mind. I could use the Google Maps API, overlay the shopping mall's picture and try to use some algorithm to mark the best route. Or, I could just place the picture and manually make an algorithm to mark the path (probably Dijkstra).
Yet, it's my first time working with Android, and I don't really know which one could work the best, and which libraries I could use.
I'd appreciate any tip or suggestion.
Google map has an android api that you can directly embed google maps into your application. You can also draw overlays using its api. Take a look at
google map android api
do you know how can we create our map and show the ways from a certain locations to destinations ? Without using google map , just using a picture of a map , is there any way to draw routes on it?I am not asking projects or codes , just need some suggestions related to drawings and considering the obstacles in the way ?Thank you
You should have your way points in somewhere(maybe in db or in xml file etc) and also for getting map base you should have a map provider like yahoo, bing, google or openstreetmap(which is free to use - no api key needed considering others)
after having these two sources you can use Geoserver(which is opensource map data manipulater and provider) to put these sources together and get them as map base image.
considering your "just using a picture of a map" is an owerwellming issue. Because you will have to do some calculation to find where to put your points programatically. So Geoserver does that automatically.
also I suggest you to hava a look at osmdroid and osmbonuspack they may help.
I need a Map API for Android that can provide me with indexed nodes and indices that make up the road network. The main idea is to determine if two GPS devices are on the same road. Thank you in advance
A Map API by itself will not have that information. Anyway, you can get it from OpenStreetMap freely. You can download it from here.
I don't understand from your question if you intend on displaying the results on a map. If so, and you want a nice and free map API, I would suggest Leaflet. It's not as mature as the likes of OpenLayers but, as you've tagged this post with "android", Leaflet just kicks ass in the mobile department.
OpenStreetMap is definitely a good source of data for this kind of project. Unlike google maps, it gives developers access to the underlying vector data of a map (fully open). This allows interesting new use cases which simply are not possible with google maps, and something involving geometric calculations like this would definitely fit into that category. You either need OpenStreetMap or some other source of "vector" map data, and beyond OpenStreetMap this can be expensive.
Unfortunately that's not the full answer to your question. You still have a lot of work to do to use the data in the way you intend. You need to calculate the proximity of two points (GPS readings from two devices?) to nearby roads, and figure out which road the point lies closest to. It's the kind of powerful geo calculation you might do using a GIS package such as QGIS or a functions of a geo-aware database system PostGIS.
But that's not the answer to your question, because you need to do these calculations on device. I'm not aware of an off-the-shelf library to do this on android. I think you would have to roll your own.
But another challenge is to get the vector data onto the device in a suitable format in the first place, and this is the first thing to solve. You'd want the vector data either as a large download for a whole country, or perhaps a smaller area, perhaps with an on-the-fly download feature within this app. Whole countries are not infeasible when working with maps in vector form (ever tried the awesome MayDroyd app?), but require some compact formatting. Happily some of these problems are starting to be solved in open source off-the-shelf libraries. You could try to build on top of MapsForge for example.
So then you're back to the challenge of writing on-device code to poke around in this data and do the calculations you want to do. I suppose it could be rather good if projects like MapsForge included generic PostGIS style geo-functions to make this easier. Something to ask the mapsforge developers about perhaps.
I want to mark historical 'points of interest' across the globe on a mapping solution such as Google Maps (or something else).
I'll be getting an Android app created in which I want to be able to provide the users the ability to search for and locate the nearest such 'point of interests' around their current location.
Should I be using Google Maps or something else like OSM?
How should I be marking them on Google or elsewhere?
(a) I want to be able to mark these places with pictures as well and
(b) I want to store them at my end in a generic format as well, just in case!
How should the Android app search for the closest such points?
As I understand, Google Maps can show its own map overlaid with my data when I provide a KML file (http://code.google.com/apis/kml/documentation/kmlSearch.html). Can that be shown "within an Android app"? (ie, I know it can be shown on a webpage, but can it be shown in a native app?)
I will suggest google maps. Reason is google maps is updated often and part
of the maps from osm is not as latest.
Probably store this marking in your own datastore called point_of_interest.
The info window is also a special kind of overlay for displaying content
(usually text or images) within a popup balloon on top of a map at a given
location. read here for more information.
your android app should detect current user location and send the information
such as latitude and longitude to your server. Hence the query to search
for point of interest is done by the server and process the data and send
back to user android app. For example, the query would be something like
select * from point_of_interest where distance < 10km limit 5;
yes, read this link
Ok, for an app I built for a customer, we had a similar requirement. Basically, I needed to display the locations of interest withing 200miles of my current location. The way this worked for me was that I took my current location and made a Web Services call to their servers where they did the Geographic calculation and returned a list of results to me.
I would have the Android app just use the MapView and then user Overlays to display icons on the map. The problem with displaying the items using kml is that they will not be clickable by the user so their will be no interactivity. If you do choose to do it with kml, there is some example code located in this project: https://github.com/sunlightlabs/congress
I prefer google maps. Google maps SDK looks good and the sdk performs well. I don't know a SDK that has something like a OSMMapView that offers the same performance and features like google maps does (please correct me). But OSM can be as visual appealing as google maps. Cloudmade has tons of different styles for OSM data.
If you want to display maps by google, you have to use the Maps Library that ships with the Android SDK.
You can display any Views on top of the google maps. I.e. use mapviewballoons on github.
If you have lots of POIs that you want to display you should definitely persist you data with a spatial index. So that nearest neighbour searches are fast. One solution would be to use sqlite R*Trees. I did not use them on android and they work not out of the box you have to build sqlite-android yourself (see this question). Or use Perst, or ...
If you have few data, that fits into the phone memory you can use a Quadtree. This would be even faster than the db when searching it. You will find lots of examples when you google it. You could store the data as xml, json or even serialize the whole quadtree with the java Serializable interface.
There are tons of possibillities this question is way too broad. Some random ideas:
Create a server that responds to bounding box searches over HTTP and store the POIs in a Quadtree.
Deliver all your POIs with the app. As database, xml, json or a serialized Quadtree.
I don't have experience with kml on Android.