[gdal-dev] Re: open street map

[Martin Spott]

Jukka Rahkonen wrote:
> Martin Spott <Martin.Spott <at> mgras.net> writes:

> >   http://mapserver.flightgear.org/download.psp
> > 
> > The OSM data at this DB is typically updated twice a month,

> Another source for ready made shapefiles is http://download.geofabrik.de/osm

Yup, and we know each other personally  :-)
Actually, their approach and the service I'm offering are of different
nature and aim a different target. My database is oriented at
delivering all the stuff that is required for building flight
simulation terrain, thus for example leaving mailboxes and pubs out
(don't drink and fly  ;-)
On the other hand, the FlightGear MapServer site offers the entire
coverage to the date when the import was done and you're free to chose
your bounding box. We're hosting the data anyway, so providing
on-the-fly Shapefile downloads for all of the listed layers was sort of
a side-effect.

So, if you're interesed in a feature-rich representation of a single
European country, then Geofabrik's offer certainly is the best bet for
you. If you just need individual chunks of the most visible line data
at every place of the OSM entire coverage, then visit the FlightGear
MapServer.

> If you use PostGIS then quite a good way for translating OSM data to other
> formats or publish it through MapServer is to import the data fist to PostGIS
> with  osm2pgsql utility.

This is what I'm doing at the FlightGear Mapserver.


While we are at it: I'm not entirely certain that having an OGR driver
to read OSM is really a sane solution. The OSM format resembles a
moving target and those guys at OSM, who decide when to make a format
switch, are not the sort of people who happily negotiate 'release'
dates with 'external' efforts that might be affected by such a switch.
In other words: If you're going to integrate an OSM reader into OGR,
then chances are high that the most recent GDAL release is most of the
time going to be behind the current state of affairs with the OSM
format ....

In my eyes it's much more clever to rely on a tool ('osm2pgsql') whose
development resides at the heart of the OSM project itself and
therefore is accurately in sync with the current OSM format.

Cheers,
	Martin.
-- 
 Unix _IS_ user friendly - it's just selective about who its friends are !
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