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I'm not sure how reasonable this question even is, but it leaves me no less curious after a bit of searching. If I am looking to build a network based on road features and attributes, is Network Analyst my best bet? Is it my only bet? The world of FOSS (Free and Open Source) is new and exciting to me, but I find it difficult to navigate as a newbie. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

My intended uses would include tracing the network, finding intersecting features at given locations along the network, and creating network decision rules for route creation.

Edit: Answers so far have been great, but could anyone share their personal experiences and preferences as far as routing interfaces are concerned?

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Which use cases do you have? pgRouting is popular in the OS world. – underdark♦ Mar 4 '11 at 19:43
Added a bit more information. Is this what you meant? – Nathanus Mar 4 '11 at 19:54
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possible duplicate of Alternatives to pgRouting – whuber♦ Mar 4 '11 at 22:09

3 Answers

up vote 10 down vote accepted

If you are mostly interested in traversal/routing, go with pgRouting.

If you don't find what you need to do there, networkx has a freakishly large number of algorithms for graphs and now loads shapefiles out-of-the-box using OGR.

nx_spatial extends networkx in some minor ways mostly related to utility networks.

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Cool, I hadn't heard of networkx before. – jvangeld Mar 5 '11 at 0:33
Thanks. This is a good starting place for me to continue searching. – Nathanus Mar 6 '11 at 14:00
up vote 5 down vote

You might want to browse this post:

and look through the previous posts using the Network and Routing tags

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up vote 3 down vote

spatiaite has routing capabiliies with a GUI. I have never tried it. http://www.gaia-gis.it/spatialite/spatialite-network-2.3.1.html

/Nicklas

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