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Hi,

I was looking at the OSM data online and can clearly see that in my area are also power lines digitized. However, when I download OSM data from one of the servers and load them in a GIS I cant find points for the poles nor polylines re sampling the data shown on osm.org. I particularly downloaded data for Denmark from http://download.geofabrik.de/osm/europe/

Are does information not distributed or can somebody tell me where to find them?

Cheers Thomas

asked 14 May '12, 11:19

TomDK's gravatar image

TomDK
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accept rate: 0%

edited 24 Dec '16, 13:33

aseerel4c26's gravatar image

aseerel4c26 ♦
32.6k18248554


The free shapefile downloads on download.geofabrik.de only contain the most important features from OSM; powerlines are not included.

The .osm.bz2 and .osm.pbf files from the same site, on the other hand, contain the full OSM data.

Anyone making shapefiles must select which features to export; it is impossible to export "all" features.

There are several ways to get powerlines into your GIS system:

  • make your own shapefiles, or have someone do that for you; common utilities for this are osm2shp or osmjs.
  • import data into a PostGIS database using osm2pgsql and point your GIS system to that database (requires support for talking to PostGIS, available e.g. in Quantum GIS);
  • load OSM data directly into your GIS system (requires support for OSM data format, available e.g. in Quantum GIS and ArcGIS)
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answered 14 May '12, 11:51

Frederik%20Ramm's gravatar image

Frederik Ramm ♦
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accept rate: 23%

On osm.org, move the map so that an electricity pole is on the map. Here's an example:

http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=53.27938&lon=-1.3337&zoom=17&layers=M

Zoom in.

Select "browse map data" from the "edit" menu (select the little triangle on the right to get the menu).

The electricity pole will be shown by a green dot. Click it.

Click "details" to the right of the node number. You can now see what it's tagged as an who added it (and the node number to look for in your "Denmark" extract).

Repeat the process for the polyline ("way") representing the cable.

On that example of mine, the poles are "power=tower" and the cables "power=line".

If this doesn't work for you perhaps you could post a permalink to the area where you can see power lines but can't get data for?

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answered 14 May '12, 11:36

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SomeoneElse ♦
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accept rate: 16%

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question asked: 14 May '12, 11:19

question was seen: 13,913 times

last updated: 24 Dec '16, 13:35

NOTICE: help.openstreetmap.org is no longer in use from 1st March 2024. Please use the OpenStreetMap Community Forum