OpenStreetMap has landed at Snowflake, and we are excited! We’ve been getting inventive, developing a way for you to easily load and view OpenStreetMap data in your GIS, using GO Loader!
OpenStreetMap is a free, crowd sourced data set supplied as xml .osm files (a compressed version .bz2 is also available). GO Loader can load both formats directly, so there is no need for any data transformation – we make loading OpenStreetMap incredibly easy!
Points, lines and polygons!
Our new OpenStreetMap Tool creates geometry (points, lines and polygons) to represent the OpenStreetMap data, which you can view in your GIS. Based on the relationships between nodes (latitude and longitude coordinate pairs) the tool identifies stand-alone points, nodes that make up a line, and in turn those lines that make up a polygon as well as identifying ‘complex’ polygons (those with one or more holes).
Building all this geometry is all very well but our new tool goes a lot further than just building the geometry. It also cleans it, removing duplicates, reordering polygons and generally ensuring the geometry is clean to render correctly in your GIS.
Lets not forget the attributes…
But what is the value of viewing this in a GIS without some attribution to provide context? You need to know what each GIS object represents for it to be of use!
To get you up and running quickly, we have created an OpenStreetMap Project Template that contains the most popular OpenStreetMap attributes (taken from the OpenStreetMap tag_key values used globally).
This allows you to identify the following objects, classified as:
- Amenity
- Address
- Bridge
- Buildings
- Highways
- Land Use
- Leisure
- Natural
- Railway
- Shop
- Waterway
Customise your attribution!
We know that our customers are unique and you may want to view specific attributes in a GIS that vary from the above list. No problem! We’ve have developed the ability for you to customise the attributes you want to use. This is managed from your GO Loader OpenStreetMap project, which the OSM Tool integrates with, making it very simple to set up.
Data download
Start downloading data directy from the OpenStreetMap website, or if you want to download OpenStreetMap by country, take a look at the following web portals: cloudmade.com or geofabrik.de
And finally…
Since the whole point of our development was to enable you to view OpenStreetMap in a GIS we have ESRI layer files as an online product resource for you to download from our customer support portal. You can also find out more about the Snowflake OpenStreetMap Tool from our product documentation wiki.snowflakesoftware.com.
Contact us today to start loading and viewing OpenStreetMap data with GO Loader.
