We are proud to announce our partnership with the German Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesy [German: Bundesamt für Kartographie und Geodäsie (BKG)] which is the central service provider of topographic data, cartography, and geodetic reference systems for the German government. The agency works under the Federal Ministry of the Interior, with specialist departments in geodesy and geoinformation.
The BKG offers a whole stack of interesting services and amongst these are a various geospatial API’s based on openrouteservice (ORS) using OpenStreetMap (OSM) data. To this end, the BKG is now running a clone of the openrouteservice infrastructure in their cloud center offering geocoding, directions and isochrones.
The cooperation is particularly interesting as we will not only benefit from interesting feature requests but also from new data sets enabling a higher quality for directions, especially in terms of elevation data.
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More features for Cyclists:
Furthermore we have introduced 3 new interesting features to the ORS API, especially suitable for cyclists.
Continue straight
Continue straight forces your route to keep going straight at specific waypoints even if u-turns would be faster. It basically makes your route more pleasant.
Bearings
Bearings filters the segments of the road network a waypoint can basically snap to. It can be passed to the API as a comma-separated list that can consist of one or two float values, where the first value is the bearing and the second one is the allowed deviation from the bearing. The bearing can take values between 0 and 360 clockwise from true north.
Radiuses
With radiuses you can limit the search of nearby road segments to every given waypoint. The values are given in meters and must be greater than 0, the value of -1 specifies no limit in the search.
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Links:
BKG
Openrouteservice
Openrouteservice API documentation