Semi-social / semi-commercial projects
ENAiKOON is involved in a variety of different projects that involve both social and commercial objectives.
For example, ENAiKOON is committed to enhancing the data available on OSM. They use postal codes and toll nodes for its commercial activities; however, their involvement in the OSM project goes beyond their own commercial interests. Since the data currently available in OSM is insufficient, ENAiKOON has decided to take on the project for the benefit of all OSM users.
+49 30 397475-30
+49 30 397475-40
Load-balancing capability of
tile servers
At the beginning of 2010, ENAiKOON commissioned Geofabrik www.geofabrik.de to set up two “tile servers” that calculate the tiles required to display a map from the OSM data on one screen.
As part of the project order, Geofabrik wrote a new algorithm to improve queue management and load-balancing for tile calculation and to replace “renderd”, the program previously used for OpenStreetMap. The new software, called Tirex, has more configuration options and is better suited for the demanding ENAiKOON server topography.
Benefit for the OSM project:
The new software has been provided free of charge as an open source project under the GPL license and is already being used and enhanced by other project members.
For more details about this project:
wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tirex
Toll collection monitoring
Trucks and lorries that drive on the German motorways and some other designated routes weighing more than 12 tons must pay a fee for each kilometre travelled on these roads. This toll is collected in Germany by Tollcollect on behalf of the federal government.
The toll fees that should be paid for each motorway and distance are determined by the Federal Highway Agency. The fees are listed on Mauttabelle and can be downloaded from this chart.
ENAiKOON’s German customers have an interest in verifying the toll charges that are sent to them. The ENAiKOON tracking devices that are installed on trucks gather travelling data, thus saving the relevant “toll node” information. This is then sent to the ENAiKOON servers where their customers can analyse the information to determine the exact toll node charges.
A prerequisite for the correct calculation of toll fees is having an accurate, georeferenced list of the Federal Highway Agency toll nodes. For this reason, ENAiKOON began compiling and cross-referencing the agency’s georeferenced list of all toll nodes in March 2010. At that time, there were close to 1,000 motorway exits which corresponded to a particular toll node that were unnamed or tagged incorrectly in OSM. This data has since then been corrected, resulting in the present OSM database including all 2,800 motorway exits, crossings, and interchanges.
Donation of the toll collection
data to the OSM project
Benefiting the OSM project:
In June 2010, the updated and corrected toll collection data was given to the OSM project. The data included all of the collected German motorway exits, crossings, and interchanges. The data donation took place at Linuxdays in Berlin on June 11, 2010.
The data was officially given to Lars Lingner, a member of the OpenStreetMap foundation and the FOSSGIS e.V. He accepted the data on behalf of the global OpenStreetMap community.
