European Open Route Service Complete
Based on OpenStreetMap and other Open Geodata technology, the Open Route Service now covers the whole of Europe.
As Professor Dr. Zipf of Germany's Bonn University told Linux Magazine Online, the OpenLS Route Service is now available for all Europe and vast areas of neighboring countries.
Newly added states include Holland, Belgium, Portugal, Greece, Turkey, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Luxembourg, Cyprus, Slovenia, Slovakia, Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria, Bosnia Herzegovina, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Ukraine, Belarus, Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Malta, Iceland, numerous micro states and even western parts of Russia, reaching as far as Moscow. Dr Zipf also told Linux Magazine the number of scientific projects taking advantage of the OpenLS Routing Service, from catastrophe prediction to NASA's Worldwind, is continuously rising, and the amount of data processed has grown dramatically.
The multi-lingual service includes routing for cars, pedestrians and cyclists plus "Points of Interest" (POI) information taken from the yellow pages, and includes "Avoid Area" warnings and "Via Points". The free OpenLS Routing Service can be accessed through the Web Map Service (WMS), and thanks to the AndNav software, Google's Android system can also put the service to mobile use.
The Open Route Service project was developed by Pascal Nies and associates of the Cartography Research Group at the Bonn University. The data was collected from the free map service OpenStreetMap.