Hypothetical: I am sitting in say, a Toyota car and use its navigator to find how to get from A to B. I can enter anything I want as A or B -- addresses, telephone numbers, names of shops (which in Japan include region/city/etc names). Navigator then calculates the route and shows it to me.
Now, say I need to build a robot that performs this unit action but does it many many times. For 100 locations I would need ~5K route requests. As I explained earlier, I need it to build a graph. You can loosely call it a dataset. Since such datasets do not exist in nature -- they are neither maps now traditional GIS formats (vector or otherwise) -- the datasets have to be created from scratch. Note that what ArcGIS calls a network is not really a graph -- it is more like a set of loosely-coupled pair-wise routes.
Now, consider this:
(1) Toyota Navigators, or actually their DVD ROMs are in proprietary format. Basically you cannot use it.
(2) ArcGIS can actually find addresses and you can use ArcScripts to find routes between places (see this example), but it is only possible in a paid ArcGIS Desktop version of software. However, if you have the paid version, you can load is with various data and use it offline.
(3) GoogleMapsAPI does all that in one package. It provides the scripts (API) that find you the route between two locations. It is equally strong to a car navigator in terms of being able to find places based on irregular string identifiers. When the API returns the route, it is split in laps (roads?) and each is provided with coordinates of intersections. Each road also has a name. The problem is the daily quota in the free access to the API.
The reason why this problem is nagging me is this. ArcGIS is a paid product -- it is actually not cheap. There is also ArcGIS Japan which probably has reliable maps of Japan. I can also overcome the Google Maps API quota problem by paying $9 a month to be able to issue 100K requests a day -- I can basically build a large dataset a day with this quota and I can stop paying when I am done (monthly contracts).
But. Not that I am cheap .... but I was really hoping that I could build an online community of collaborators which need the same kinds of datasets as I do and which I could work with to possibly build a library of custom datasets. The pilot webapp that builds such a dataset is kept wide open at this link for several days now but the only collaborators I can see are my own clients.
Will wait/try some more ... just for the fun of it. If not, will have to resort to the paid version of Google Maps API.
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