Creating Something Like Mapquest

[brucew98]

HELP!!!!! Guys, I want to create something like mapquest.com but I do not know how to begin the implementation. I started a script where I was able to generate a drawing based on some coordinates that I had entered in a table through mysql. But how can I take a map that I have on disk and determine routes, and length of time taken, as well as the directions in words????

Any ideas out there?

[NogDog]

Well, I'd do what Mapquest probably did: hire a skilled system desigener, a database specialist, a computer graphics expert, and a staff of programmers to implement their design. :)

[brucew98]

Lol...thanks but I am not that rich. I actually want to present it for something at school. It would not be full blown as mapquest, but it would have map manipulation capabilities. I just need a little help starting.

[AdamGundry]

This is definitely a nontrivial project, and you're going to have to learn some graph theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_theory) if you don't know it already. I think the place to start would be creating a representation of the map as a weighted graph (aka network). You would then need to implement a single-source shortest path algorithm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortest_path_problem) such as Dijkstra's algorithm (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dijkstra%27s_algorithm) to find the route.

Adam