Hi there! I thank you all for doing massive work in educating and instructing us. I am a new user of this OSM and a big admirer of GIS. I am trying to mentor myself on GIS and I downloaded QGIS training manual only to find OSM used as a source of streets and places datasets. My question is, how do i download datasets of a specified place? Let say I want to download a place like Serengeti National Park in Tanzania. I thank you in advance for your time and paying attention to my question. Regards Godfrey asked 12 May '14, 08:09  GodfreyvOyema edited 12 May '14, 10:43  iii |
One Answer:
I never tried the tandem of QGIS and OSM before, but since QGIS 2.0 you have a builtin OSM importer that AFAIK allows you to filter for roadnetworks etc. Other ways to get OSM data is to download OSM extracts, filter it using osmosis and import it as shapefile, geoJSON, ... . For first testing purpose you might be already happy by using the Overpass API for getting small areas with the objects you are interested in. Or you get shapefile for example from Geofabrik. BUT as you will find out the OSM model isn't designed for a specific purpose (rendering, queries, routing, geocoding, ...) but is an intermediate format that is build to allow easy modelling/tagging of all kind of real world features with geolocation. For your scenario this mean that you might merge OSM ways with same name into one roadnetwork and create an intelligent filter to unite places modelled as node with place=* tag and ones modelled as boundary relation. answered 12 May '14, 11:04 iii |
