Barrelman

The search and routing engine behind Parchment. Barrelman takes an OpenStreetMap extract and turns it into a set of services: place search, spatial queries, vector tiles and routing, all from the same data and with no dependency on commercial map APIs. It is named after the sailor in the crow’s nest who watches the horizon.

PostGIS does the heavy lifting, Martin serves the tiles and GraphHopper handles routes. GTFS transit feeds, bike share systems and address data import alongside the OSM extract.

Barrelman began as a subsystem of Parchment and became its own product, priced by usage against Google Maps Platform, Mapbox and Geoapify. That story is in The subsystem that became a product.