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  • Volker Krause's avatar
    Initial experiments to improve airport coordinates based on OSM data · 4b5489d0
    Volker Krause authored
    So far the coordinates we use for navigating to/from airports come from
    Wikidata, and are typically somewhere on the center of the whole airport
    area, typically a runway. That's far from ideal for navigation, as that's
    neither a location you want to or event can get to, and in extreme cases
    this even leads to navigation "snapping" to the opposite side of the
    airport entirely.
    
    Instead we want a coordinate around somewhere around the entrance. So far
    there's three types of information from OSM we consider here:
    * terminal buildings (or rather the center point of their bounding box)
    * entrance nodes on terminal building polygons (unfortunately not reliably
    available in the input data).
    * railway stations on the premise of the airport.
    
    This improves the result for many smaller or mid-sized airports
    considerably already. What this cannot improve is the situation
    at large airports with widely spread terminals (LHR, CDG, MXP, etc).
    Those however cannot meaningfully represented by a single coordinate
    anyway.
    
    Code isn't hooked up yet, this is just for local experiments at this
    point.
    4b5489d0