The new release v0.8.0 of IsoMap was released today. Starting with this version the computation of isodistances has been implemented besides the isochrone calculation. Furthermore, the most exiting new feature of this release is the consideration of elevation information during calculation.
Other changes in the backend of the IsoMap webapplication deal with the support of datasets. It is now possible to compute isochrones in the city of Ulm. However, the dataset of great britain is temporary not available and will be re-added in one of the next releases.
Besides the new “elevation-aware calculation” one additional innovation is the introduction of two new algorithms capable of computing isochrones (and also isodistances). They are called MineT and MineTX and in contrast to the existing algorithms they make use of tile pyramids to speed up computation. Also very exiting is the integration of so called SpeedEstimation modes. With them it is possible to regard the type of the way use, the maximal speed allowed as well as the surface of the edge. It now makes a difference if one travels on an paved street or on a icy forest path.
Another cool thing about these modes is that they allow the definition of so called “profiles”. They are used to tailor the computation to individual users. Therefore, resulting isochrones of a professional cyclist look different than the ones of a hobby (or even sunday) cyclist. The profiles are created from GPS-tracks, but since commandline tools are used during creation a web interface is not available (at least not right now). As a result new profiles can only be added by administrators and not uses, so if you are interested to add a new profile please feel free to use the contact form.
Besides all these changes one additional thing should be mentioned. The connectionPool used on the server (to connect to the database) has been changed from BoneCP to HikariCP. As a result calculations should be faster, but depending on the algorithm used there will be either a significant improvement or no noticeable change at all.
When it comes to the user interface of IsoMap things did not changed that heavy. However, there are some new input fields needed to support the new features and the map library “leaflet” has been integrated in a now final version 1.0 (to be exact: it is version 1.0.1). A new algorithm used to compute the isochrones coverage has been added that makes use of the not exact, but very fast convex hull computation.
In case of any feedback, comments and/or questions, the contact form – as always – can be used.