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Judith Vockenroth Avatar

Judith Vockenroth

Software developer and Pythonista. In my free time I enjoy diverse activities like singing in my choir, playing Softball, sewing clothes and being silly with my friends. If possible I do all this at the same time. To the detriment of my coworkers I tell a lot of self-made bad jokes.

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Judith Vockenroth
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    OpenStreetMap, Overpass API and Python

    Judith Vockenroth

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    7 min read

    OpenStreetMap (OSM) is known for being an open source project that allows people to browse the world map and to plan routes. However it is more than that. Among others it provides a read-only API that allows users to query for very diverse map data: Overpass API Data structure of OSM To understand the structure of the queries, we first need to understand how OSM saves its data. OSM uses basic data structures: node, way, and relation. Each element can have multiple tags, which consist of a key-value pair and they help specify the features of each element. Nodes also…

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    Build a route planner for maps using Python

    Judith Vockenroth

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    7 min read

    In this article I use the metric system, where 1 meter = 3.28 feet. I also talk about highways. Here I use the definition in British English, where highway refers to any path with a public right of access. We are all familiar with the existence of route planners like google maps or OpenStreetMaps (OSM), that allows us to get the shortest path between two points in space. With OSM and it’s read-only API Overpass we can get very detailed information about a chosen region, including streets roads and ways, but also information like if a street is illuminated, if…