[rchiniquy]

Check out http://www.openstreetmap.org. They provide open-source map data and code (like rana which has a module for routing) that does least-cost routing. There are a variety of approaches based on simple graph algorithms like naive A*.

[SingAlong]

Yeah, but I need to have the routing points right?

naive A* Can you explain?

And what's rana? All I need is route points between places even for service roads via programatic access (an API). I would like links to free resources (I'm a student)

[rchiniquy]

Yeah, I wasn't sure what kind of answer you were looking for. OSM provides exports of the street data which gives you the ability to either:

A. Run a pre-existing routing program on it, such as http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Rana, or

B. Write your own (which would require knowledge of algorithms such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A*_search_algorithm)

There are also services where people do these things for you, and for low volume, they might not mind if you programmatically scrape their results. A good example is http://www.batchgeocode.com/

Properly, Rana isn't intended as a package for programmatic access, but it does include code which does what you want:

* http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/PyrouteLib - Pyroute is probably exactly what you want.

* Rana's routing module: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Rana/Modules#route

[SingAlong]

I just tried Gosmore (found about it on the OSM wiki). installing it on my ubuntu seems to be a bit tricky, so I haven't yet installed it (some errors).

Rana and Pyroute sound cool to me since they are in PYthon. And the software requirements to run rana or Pyroute match my system (linux). So I'll choose one of those after trying both.

Thanks for the tip

[rchiniquy]

Sure thing. You may as well try Pyroute first, since the system requirements there are a subset of the Rana requirements (it doesn't require GTK or Cairo, etc).