- The iMaptools Routing engine is currently a prototype and not really ready for prime time. It is a fully functional proof of concept, but needs significant additional work to be a fully functional commercial product. It currently uses Dijkstra's algorithm for shortest path calculation and can generate driving instructions or drive-time analysis, has a Traveling Salesman solver to support optimization of multiple stop.
- The things that are missing are support for A-Star search algorithm for long haul point to point routes, the need for turn restrictions and dynamic segmentation to allow routes to start and end partially along a road segment. And finally, compilers for the common commercial routable data sets.
- In the meanwhile, we have extracted the Traveling Salesman solver and created a separate package for that as a Perl module. It could be wrapped for other languages also. Read more ...
Tiger to Shapefile Translator
- We created the Tiger to Shapefile translator primarily for our own internal use, but have licensed it to some clients. We update it as required for each release of US Census Tiger/Line data and use it to produce our Tiger data sets. There are other tools available in the OpenSource and the commercial worlds, but we do a lot of extra processing during the translation to pre-classify road segments and standardize names for fast labeling and highway route numbers. It is easy to extract and filter data into separate files based on CFCC. It also build extra indexes that are used by our geocoder and it is very fast and can process a whole Tiger/Line release in about 3 hours depending on the system. It takes about 8-12 hours to download the Tiger/Line files on a 150KB/sec connection or about 2.5 times that on a DSL connection.
- We created demographic profiles for some of our clients. This represents a small subset of the 100GB database of the 2000 Census summary file information. These subsets can be used to establish simplified profiles of areas. These are used for targeting potential store locations, targeted mailings, or evaluating real estate markets to mention a few common uses.