routes.ubes.co.uk

Central repository for the routes.ubes.co.uk project. Provides hosting for the gpx files, and compiled data that is used for generating the site.

Adding new routes

To add a new route, all that is required is a gpx file of the route. The file must have some metadata in it:

• <name> - The name of the route
• <desc> - A short description of the route

Optionally add the following tags:

• <author> - The person or persons who created the route
• <keywords> - Any keyword tags that you think might describe the route, separated by commas.

This gpx file should then be added to the gpx directory.

Compilation

The compilation step is done by running compile.py, which will compile all gpx files in the gpx directory and also any gpx files supplied as command-line argumanets.

The compilation step is automatically performed when new commits are pushed to this repo, via a github action.

The compilation step takes the provided gpx file, adds/replaces the heights using SRTM.py, and then renames the file to a standard form derived from the hash of the polyline of the route.

From each of the standardised gpx files in the gpx directory a json dictionary is created, which contains:

• The name for the route
• The description of the route
• An id derived from the hash of the combined segments
• The relative path to the filename of the gpx route (from the repo root)
• The author of the route
• A list of tags that apply to the route
• for each of the segments in the file:
• A polyline of the route
• A length of the route
• An ele polyline of the route, plotting elevation against distance instead of longitude against latitude. These two dimensions are both given in hundreds of kilometres (10⁵ metres) instead of degrees, so that the encoded polyline algorithm can store them as efficiently as possible with a resolution of one metre.

These json dictionaries are then concatenated to create walks.json.

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