Routing in polygon layers? Yes we can!

April 17, 2015 Anita Graser

A few weeks ago, the city of Vienna released a great dataset: the so-called “Flächen-Mehrzweckkarte” (FMZK) is a polygon vector layer with an amazing level of detail which contains roads, buildings, sidewalk, parking lots and much more detail:

preview of the Flächen-Mehrzweckkarte

Now, of course we can use this dataset to create gorgeous maps but wouldn’t it be great to use it for analysis? One thing that has been bugging me for a while is routing for pedestrians and how it’s still pretty bad in many situations. For example, if I’d be looking for a route from the northern to the southern side of the square in the previous screenshot, the suggestions would look something like this:

Pedestrian routing in Google Maps

… Great! Google wants me to walk around it …

Pedestrian routing on openstreetmap.org

… Openstreetmap too – but on the other side :P

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just cross the square? There’s no reason not to. The routing graphs of OSM and Google just don’t contain a connection. Polygon datasets like the FMZK could be a solution to the issue of routing pedestrians over squares. Here’s my first attempt using GRASS r.walk:

Routing with GRASS r.walk (Green areas are walk-friendly, yellow/orange areas are harder to cross, and red buildings are basically impassable.)

… The route crosses the square – like any sane pedestrian would.

The key steps are:

Assigning pedestrian costs to different polygon classes
Rasterizing the polygons
Computing a cost raster for moving using r.walk
Computing the route using r.drain

I’ve been using GRASS 7 for this example. GRASS 7 is not yet compatible with QGIS but it would certainly be great to have access to this functionality from within QGIS. You can help make this happen by supporting the crowdfunding initiative for the GRASS plugin update.

by underdark at 8:50 PM under gis , grass , ogd , ogdwien , opengovermentdata , routing (Comments)

Computing network centers

March 7, 2015 Anita Graser

How do you objectively define and compute which parts of a network are in the center? One approach is to use the concept of centrality.

Centrality refers to indicators which identify the most important vertices within a graph. Applications include identifying the most influential person(s) in a social network, key infrastructure nodes in the Internet or urban networks, and super spreaders of disease. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrality)

Researching this topic, it turns out that some centrality measures have already been implemented in GRASS GIS. thumbs up!

v.net.centrality computes degree, betweeness, closeness and eigenvector centrality.

As a test, I’ve loaded the OSM street network of Vienna and run

v.net.centrality -a input=streets@anita_000 output=centrality degree=degree closeness=closeness betweenness=betweenness eigenvector=eigenvector

The computations take a while.

In my opinion, the most interesting centrality measures for this street network are closeness and betweenness:

Closeness “measures to which extent a node i is near to all the other nodes along the shortest paths”. Closeness values are lowest in the center of the network and higher in the outskirts.

Betweenness “is based on the idea that a node is central if it lies between many other nodes, in the sense that it is traversed by many of the shortest paths connecting couples of nodes.” Betweenness values are highest on bridges and other important arterials while they are lowest for dead-end streets.

(Definitions as described in more detail in Crucitti, Paolo, Vito Latora, and Sergio Porta. “Centrality measures in spatial networks of urban streets.” Physical Review E 73.3 (2006): 036125.)

Centrality: low values in pink, high values in green

Works great! Unfortunately, v.net.centrality is not yet part of the QGIS Processing GRASS toolbox. It would certainly be a great addition.

by underdark at 5:50 PM under gis analysis , grass , network , openstreetmap , osm (Comments)

Infrastructure Coverage based on Open Data

July 24, 2011 Anita Graser

This is something I have been wanting to do for a long time: map which areas of Vienna have fast access to a certain kind of infrastructure. Now, I finally found time and data to perform this analysis. Data used is OSM road data (Cloudmade shapefile) for Austria and metro station coordinates for Vienna by Max Kossatz and Robert Harm.

Before importing the OSM roads into PostGIS, I cut out my area of interest and created a clean topology using GRASS v.clean.break. Once loaded into the database, assign_vertex_id() function does the rest and the network is ready for routing and distance calculations.
For the metro stations, I calculated the nearest network node using George MacKerron’s Nearest Neighbor function.

Catchments were calculated using driving_distance() function. It returns distance to a given metro station for all network nodes (up to a maximum distance). The result can be interpolated to show e.g. which areas are at most 1 km away from any metro station.

1 km catchments around metro stations in Vienna

Close-up look at the 1 km catchment zone border

Once set up, performing this analysis is reasonably fast. Instead of metro stations, any other infrastructure coverage can be analyzed easily. I could imagine this being really useful when looking for a new flat: “Find me an area close to work, a metro station and a highschool.”

The next great thing would be to have all data for calculation of transit travel times too. Yes, I’m looking at you Wiener Linien!

by underdark at 5:04 PM under grass , osm , pgrouting , postgis (Comments)

QGIS with WPS Plugin in Action

January 28, 2011 Anita Graser

The following video by soerengebbert shows the latest developments in OS WPS applications: PyWPS (using wps-grass-bridge to integrate GRASS modules as WPS processes), GRASS 7, and QGIS using the qwps plugin by Horst Düster (all latest svn versions).