Yesterday, after reading the post about routeable OSM data, I discovered the download section of CloudMade. By country they offer OSM data in various file formats. Shapefile is one of them. I downloaded the Austrian OSM data as Shapefile (still, after decades, the unbeaten #1 file format when it comes to geodata interoperability btw). There are 3 filesets included: highways, POI and natural.
After loading them into QGIS and having a quick look at the data, I must say that I’m impressed by the data quality and level of detail. Recently I proposed that our public national mapping agency should support projects like OpenStreetMap and provide parts of their road network data to the OSM community. Hereby I take this proposal back, I should’ve had a look at recent OSM updates first. The OSM road network data is, after some initial checks, better than what I’ve seen so far from our national mapping agency for general mapping purposes.
Dear mapping agency,
I’m afraid some of your departments are obsolete by now. You simply missed the train. The community has taken over your job and does it with friendlier, and probably more sustainable, licensing.
What I’ve to figure out now is a simple process how to send data edits on the Shapefile back to the OSM database. There is a good chance that we, while using the data in projects, will work on and maybe improve attributes or features. A smart tool to bridge desktop GIS and the OSM database would be very helpful here.
Another thing is to create more awareness about CC licensing and what community based work means. I’m quite often confronted with share-unfriendly attitudes like “pull down what you can get but don’t give anything in return”. There is very little understanding that sharing your work and data, base data to build individual projects on, creates a bigger benefit for all parties. I guess it’s a relic of times where geodata has been the most precious treasure you had to hide…
SVG is supposed to be the flash killer since its first appearance, and never really succeeded as we know very well. SVG is still a good choice for mapping applications in my opinion, for light-weighted thematic web mapping applications to be more precise. Vector graphics handled by an AJAX front-end, used to visualize statistical attribute data provide a user-friendly interface and are usually easy to develop. Mapping APIs like Google Maps or Open Layers support and use SVG. Web browsers like Firefox and Safari for instance natively support SVG elements, no “but you need an extra plugin discussion” anymore. There is good portion of potential users for SVG based mapping applications.