Open street map

A couple years ago I wrote a post that File Approach The most straightforward method would be to export data directly from the A better and more targeted approach is to download pre-created extracts that are provided by a But all is not lost; Geofabrik and many other providers package data in a shapefile format for smaller areas, provided that the size and number of features is not too great. For instance, on …to access files for states / provinces / admin divisions I downloaded and unzipped the file for Rhode Island. It contains a number of individual shapefiles classified by type of feature: buildings, land use, natural, places, places of worship (pofw), points of interest (pois), railways, roads, traffic, transport, water, and waterways. Many of the files appear twice: files with an “a” suffix represent polygons (areas) while files without that suffix are points or lines. Some OSM features are stored as polygons when such detail is available, while others are represented as points. For example, if I add the two places of workship files to a map, for some features you have the outline of the actual building, while for most you simply have a point. After adding the layers to the map, you’ll probably want to use Select by Attribute to select the features you want based on OSM Places of Worship. Some features are stored as points while others are polygons Geofabrik is just one option. There are Plugin Approach It would be nice to use a plugin, as that would allow you to spe...

• OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a free, open community mapping effort that has existed since 2004 • OSM has become more widely used and has begun mapping very remote regions • Contributors to OSM include not only individuals but also major corporations, where editing tools have also been created by these corporations. • OSM is likely to remain one of the most important free and open mapping data of the world. OpenStreetMap (OSM) is perhaps one of the largest geospatial collaborative projects in the world, where over 1.5 million contributors have helped to edit over 1 billion features. [1]The project effectively tries to map the world using a crowdsourcing, collaborative method. Benefits of OpenStreetMap The benefit of OSM is it is a free, open project that allows anyone to contribute data to help map the world. The project started in 2004 as a creation by Steve Coast, who studied computer science at University College London. OpenStreetMap relies on contributions from thousands of The effort was inspired by One of the best benefits of OSM is it provides data for areas of the world where map data may not be serviced by companies such as Google that provide map data. [2] In OSM, there are three types of elements, which includes nodes, that is points, where these comprise over 6 billion points on the map currently. Additionally, ways are lines that represent linear features such as roads. The third main type of element is a relation, which can act as a collection of nodes, ways, or ...

Open Map Styles We have prepared a set of beautiful Open Map Styles for our vector tiles. The styles are free and open-source, and you can adapt the design and code for your project or commercial product however you like. Either use one of our map styles directly as your base map or as a starting point for your own map design. Open Tile Schema Our new Vector Tile Schema is encoding the cartography decisions made on top of OpenStreetMap, Natural Earth and other OpenData sources and is 100% open and free to use, extend or build upon. We hope people will adapt, copy and reimplement our schema and data model in their projects while providing attribution.

You can use CloudMade's Geocoding API to search for an island in the OpenStreetMap data. The API will return the geometry of the result by default, and this sounds to me what you are looking for. For example, Arran off the coast of Scotland can be found by the following http request: (and as a neat little hack, changing the .js to .html previews the result. More docs and examples on the API are at developers.cloudmade.com/projects/show/geocoding-http-api If you don't want to use the http api, then abstraction APIs are available in multiple languages - ruby, python, perl and others. I have used CloudMade OSM extracts but had some problems with them. For example, Norway was clipped too tightly, causing some roads on the west coast to disappear. I now prefer the overpass API. Put something like this into the query form at Put the bounds of the area you want, in degrees, in the s, n, w and e attributes of the element.