[Qgis-developer] [info] openstreetmap shapefile data

[Martin Dobias]

Hi all

On Thu, Jul 3, 2008 at 1:00 PM, Paolo Cavallini <cavallini at faunalia.it> wrote:
> kimaidou ha scritto:
>
>> In this page, you will find daily updates of european openstreetmap data in
>> shapefile format.
>> It is so good I couldn't close my mouth for a while....
>> I let you have a look !!
>>
>> So it is a bit different from directly accessing openstreetmap data, but for
>> a start...
>
> The idea behind the plugin is to use OSM data directly, including the
> editing and the upload of new traces, thus effectively replacing the
> "official" josm (java, brrr) editing tool.
> It shouldn't be *too* difficult: the OSM XML is well documented, it
> should "only" be parsed back and forth.

Indeed, it's not difficult. This evening I've made a simple prototype
plugin for inspiration, check it from this repository:
http://mapserver.sk/~wonder/qgis/plugins-sandbox.xml

The plugin itself is very simple, doesn't take in account any tags nor
relations between objects, it just parses all nodes and ways and
creates appropriate layers. Btw. parsing big files (e.g. 50 MB xml)
takes quite a long time, there will be some inefficiencies.

You need recent SVN sources which include memory provider. To use it,
first get some file with OSM data in XML format (with current API
version = 0.5). There are some available for download on internet or
you can retreive them directly from OSM server like this by specifying
bounding box:
http://api.openstreetmap.org/api/0.5/map?bbox=11.54,48.14,11.543,48.145
(bounding box must have sides smaller than 0.25 degree)

I don't think I'll be continuing the development, I just hope that it
can serve as a starting point and some volunteer will take it and
improve greatly :-)
Finally, in a week I'm leaving for vacations, I'm going to be offline
for about two months so there's no time either.

Cheers
Martin