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OpenStreetMap Quickstart

Programs

JOSM

JOSM (Java OpenStreetMap Editor) is an editor for OpenStreetMap (OSM) written in Java. The current version supports stand alone GPX tracks, GPX track data from OSM database and existing nodes, line segments and metadata tags from the OSM database.

The JOSM plugin collection contains the following plugins:

  • colorscheme - Allows to create different color schemes.
  • livegps - Supports live GPS input together with gpsd.
  • measurement - Adds a dialog and a layer to measure length and angle of segments and create measurement paths.
  • openvisible - Allows opening gpx and osm files that intersect the currently visible screen area.
  • surveyor - Allows adding markers/nodes on current gps positions.
  • cadastre-fr - A special handler for the French land registry WMS server.
  • DirectUpload - Directly uploads GPS Traces from current active layer in JOSM to openstreetmap.org.
  • editgpx - Anonymizes timestamps and deletes parts of huge GPX tracks very fast.
  • lakewalker - Helps vectorizing WMS images.
  • routing - Provides routing capabilities.

Further reading

Merkaartor

Merkaartor is a map editor for OpenStreetMap which uses the Qt toolkit. It’s a bit more user friendly than JOSM, but has a few less features.

Gosmore

Gosmore is an in-development OpenStreetMap viewer, wayfinder, and search client with support for speech synthesis and fetching the current user’s current GPS location using gpsd.

Upon launching Gosmore from the Geospatial menu or Desktop folders, you will be given the chance to create the required data file if needed. You can also manually import it with:

bzip2 -dc /usr/local/share/data/osm/Nottingham_CBD.osm.bz2 | gosmore rebuild

This will create gosmore.pak and only needs to be run once. You can then search for locations within the OSM dataset, for example “Beeston Lane”. Use the middle and right mouse buttons to set the origin and destination for shortest path routing. Use the “O” button to access the program options, and the “3D” button to get a perspective view useful for in-car GPS navigation.

Osmarender

Osmarender is a rule-based rendering tool for generating SVG images of OSM data. It takes as its input an OpenStreetMap dataset and a rules file. It outputs an SVG image that is marked up in accordance with the styles defined in the rule file. In future it may be replaced with software like TileMill.

Example:

Note

This requires approx. 1 GB free RAM and takes a few days to process the full city. A single village or suburb extract should be much more manageable. See Xapi in the OSM Wiki for details on how to download smaller chunks into an .osm file, or use JOSM or Merkaartor to download a smaller chunk. A smaller subset file called Nottingham_CBD.osm has been included for your convenience, but even that still make take a rather long time to process.

cp /usr/local/share/data/osm/feature_city_CBD.osm.bz2 .
bzip2 -d feature_city_CBD.osm.bz2
osmarender feature_city_CBD.osm

You can view the results in a SVG viewer like Inkscape or Firefox:

firefox feature_city.svg

Osmosis

Osmosis is a highly capable utility program for performing many tasks at a raw level on OSM data. This includes data import and export to databases, sorting, cleaning, and creating data dumps. See the detailed usage page for more information. A simple report of author contributions can be performed as follows. Open a new Terminal, and at a command prompt type the following:

osmosis --read-xml ~/data/osm/feature_city.osm.bz2 --report-entity

Then look in the new entity-report.txt file in the home directory for the report details.

osm2pgsql

osm2pgsql is a utility program that converts OpenStreetMap (.osm) data into a format that can be loaded into PostgreSQL (PostGIS). It is often used to render OSM data visually using Mapnik, as Mapnik can query PostgreSQL for map data, but does not work directly with OSM files.

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