Geodata
A journey to enrich my hiking blog with geodata.
I've been using mapy.cz for years to plan my hiking routes, and it works really well, as it combines data from OpenStreetMap project with hiking routes and trails, with maps and has a route planner, which estimates route hiking time and difficulty.
Naturally, I wanted to use mapy.cz to document and plan my hikes, so I could keep all the information I need about hikes in one place for easy access from the phone on the trail, such as:
- links to maps with routes
- peaks and other points of interests
- mountain huts and hotels, with links reservation pages
However, leveraging mapy.cz to automatically enrich pages with data turned out to be way more difficult than I expected, because of:
- custom RPC protocol known as
fastrpc - custom geo coordinates string encoding
- publicly documented API is not used by the application itself, requires paid API key and misses features
- most notably is the
touristroute type for route planner
- most notably is the
- part of the API is just to generate URLs, which is typically done with SDK and libraries
Eventually, I ended up by developing a helper library to make queries to mapy.cz
Further development
Maybe worth checking a different provider, and/or running own instance of OSM OverPass: