Projects / Similarity search · geospatial
HikesAlike
Pick a hike you enjoyed and HikesAlike lists other hikes in Europe that feel similar: comparable length, climb, highest point, landscape and typical weather. You can also describe a hike instead of naming one, and limit results to a driving time from a starting town.
The server sleeps when idle, so the first load can take around 20 seconds.
About the project
HikesAlike is a way to find new hikes. Instead of filtering by region or difficulty, you start from a hike you already know and liked, and it ranks other hikes in Europe by how alike they are.
Each hike is compared with the one you picked on a set of measures, such as length, metres climbed, difficulty grade, highest point, the shape of the elevation profile, land cover and typical weather. Each measure gets a score, and the weighted scores add up to one similarity score. The weights can be changed in the interface. If you have no hike in mind, you can describe one instead, for example about 10 km with 800 m of climbing.
The hikes come from routes that volunteers have mapped on OpenStreetMap, so coverage follows the map: many hikes in the Alps and central Europe, fewer in the east and south-east. Long tours are cut into day stages of 8 to 25 km. The catalogue is built once into SQLite files, so there is no database server to run. The site is meant for finding ideas, not for navigation.
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