I have a bunch of GPS tracks. I want to exclude the ones which go via public roads. I'm interested in off-road segments only. Is there any public api to check if a given set of coordinates belongs to a road or street? Is there a better way to do it? Perhaps OSM?
Some context - the tracks are in UK. I'm comfortable with programming in C#/F#. I'm thinking of writing a piece of code which will filter the tracks. Computing power is limited to a single awerage PC.
I think JasonT is on the right track (excuse the pun). Note, however, it is the concept of a buffer that you want, not to actually create a buffer. If you were using PostGIS (or similar software/libraries), you'd use ST_DWithin() to reject public road points that are too close to your GPS points.
Google maps roads API can do that, if a non-OSM solution is ok with you.
See snapToRoad method which returns the GPS points snapped to the nearest Road. You can take the place id from the response and use Google Maps Places API to get corresponding Road name.
So after some research I decided to stick with the OSM metadata. I found the Overpass API, which is basically a query language, which I managed to understand reading this:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Overpass_API/Overpass_QL
and testing it here
http://overpass-api.de/query_form.html
I ended up with this query:
way
["highway"~"motorway|trunk|primary|secondary|tertiary|unclassified|residential|service|motorway_link|trunk_link|primary_link|secondary_link|tertiary_link|living_street|pedestrian|bus_guideway|raceway|road"]
({bbox});
(._;>;);
out;
This finds all the roads I considered public using a highway filter within my bounding box. Then takes those ways and loads their nodes - (._;>;); - such an obvious statement, isn't it!
This gives me the necessary metadata to use for filtering. Now I can construct geometries and intersect with my tracks using .Net Topology Suite
