Name
Nathan leeks
Tell us about yourself
Hi all, I’m a GIS developer by trade and I love this community, you’ve all taught me so much. I’ve been developing software for a good number of years now and would like to properly get something useful out there.
What do you want to learn / contribute
Professionally I do telecoms stuff now but back when I was an analyst I needed to demonstrate the effect a proposed new housing development would have on travel times to sites like shops, parks etc. I thought, ahh I know you can get open street map data, I’ll just add the lines we have for the new roads to that and do some isochrones on QGIS. I ended up on a whole Josm rabbit hole and spent so much time with the learning curve, learning how connectivity worked within osm, trying ways to import the data, and when I wanted to export it, I learnt I had to spin up my own instance of Valhalla/ graphhopper locally so I can load my custom data and do some simple routing.
I’ve been working on this problem on and off for a while now, and I think I’ve gotten somewhere with it. It’s a tool called Networkforge
Engine - GitHub - Yibbzz/networkforge: Build and edit routable street networks from GIS layers: add to, change or replace OpenStreetMap. Outputs OSM PBF (tested in Valhalla) and GeoPackage for QGIS · GitHub
All the info is in the repos, but it basically makes it really easy to integrate your own GIS data into OSM and start routing. You can export it out in PBF and GPKG formats and it gives you a before and after network. It is purely for making building networks really easy within QGIS.
I really want to see if what I’ve built will be useful to the guys at routing earth, who created the QGIS plugin for Valhalla GitHub - routing-earth/network-analyst-qgis-plugin: QGIS plugin to use Valhalla for routing, isochrones, matrices & expansion. · GitHub
Specifically I would like my tool to replace the core functionality of ArcGIS network analyst, create your own network -
On QGIS, all opensource.
That’s why when I saw they created this GitHub - routing-earth/qgis-network-analyst-tutorial-challenge: Goal is to match and exceed https://doc.esri.com/en/arcgis-pro/latest/help/analysis/networks/network-analyst-tutorials.html. · GitHub
I’ve been hooked to try and see if we can replace Esri for routing. When I’m happy with the tool and tested enough I’ll send a PR there with all the docs and would love you all to try and see if it could be a possible replacement.
Cheers and nice to meet you all !