Converting a GPX file to a route

Hi,
I am a PhD student in the area of Emergent Computing. My area of interest is in researching the route planning strategies of cyclists.

In order to do this research the cyclists that I am studying will create GPS data as they cycle around Edinburgh and then either upload it to a site such as trailfinder or similar or email it to me.

In order for me to use this to analyse this GPX file I need to convert it to a list of nodes that they have visited.

I could write a piece of software that looks at all the latitude/longitude points in the GPX file and then searches for a node within a set radius, say 5m so that I can produce this list of nodes.

However does any code like this already exist? If so it would be good to reuse it…

Thanks,
Cathy

If you really want all nodes around the route that the biker took: then this is a common problem called “Get me all Points of Interests (POI) around this route”, it’s used among geocachers to find all caches that are x km from their route. I’m pretty sure you can do something similar with standard GIS tools as well.

I think perhaps gpsbabel can do it with GPX routes (not traces).
PostgreSQL can probably do it in some way easy way (lets ask JRA) <— got with this
Grass/ArcView has magic GIS pixie dust <— or dust

So no there is no tools that does exactly what you want, lots of way to do it, big help right?.

emj,
Thank you for your help. I will now beetle away and try it out.
Cathy