[Roadster] Importing Tiger issue

[Ian McIntosh]

Hi Arne,

> I'm not aware of libmygis' capabilities

libmygis is a work in progress.  The author, Jeremy Cole, is subscribed
to this list.  I think his plan is to make it support whatever Roadster
needs (at the least), but don't take my word for it.  The only problem I
have with libmygis is that I don't know when it'll be ready. :)

I just learned of GDAL.  I'd like to look into it.

> not sure if it's a good idea to rely on a third party library for that 

If it's an open-source library and we can fork it if necessary, what is
the danger?

> I think the sorting preferences should be configuarble by the user... :)

What would the options be?  Like the Wiki hints at[1], I think it might
make sense to have an Advanced Search dialog at some point.  It would
let you specify all parts of your search, just like Google's Advanced
Search[2].

> which tables are looked up in which order

It's all in search_road.c and search_location.c ('location' being the
name for POI in the code).  I think the code is pretty well documented,
but I'd be happy to answer any specific questions about it.

> I'm keen to provide some efford to make roadster be able to support other 
> countries' mapping data and to be able to search for their addresses

I decided to not worry too much about internationalization of the
storage because a) data isn't available yet and b) I didn't know how to
do it. :)

It would be helpful if you could provide as many real-world addressing
examples as possible that don't fit the "STREET, CITY, STATE, COUNTRY"
pattern.

> Is roadster UTF-8 safe yet? :p

The GUI is.  I'm not so sure about the database. :)

> the huge overhead of the embedded mysql server...

What overhead are you referring to?  Memory, disk space, disk access
time, CPU time, or what?

I do have some big problems with the way MySQL's Spatial Extensions
work.  The biggest problem is that we incur one disk seek for each road
segment read in.  It's also a bit heavy on the on-disk storage size.

I'd be happy to work with you to come up with a new storage scheme!

Best,
-Ian

[1] http://cairographics.org/Roadster_2fHowItWorks_2fSearchBox
[2] http://www.google.com/advanced_search