I understand that most of the data in OSM for USA is coming from TIGER. It seems that this doesn't have complete road key attributes such as speed limit, maximum weight, allowed / restricted turns, lane change etc.
I found that some state level DOT do have public datasets available for the roads within their jurisdiction, however some states don't have that. I wonder if the OSM community knows if the data already available at these state DOT's was loaded in the OSM?
Please also let me know if there was a netter place to ask this question?
Many thanks,
It is stated in the OSM webpage as well as in other GIS blogs that OSM doesn't have much data on key attributes of roads ie truck restrictions, however some DOT do have data on that.
In OSM pages it wasn't clear if that data was loaded.
There's been an awful lot of discussion about data imports, especially within the USA, over the years. I suspect that if data is available and hasn't been imported into OSM it's for one of two reasons:
the quality isn't very good
the licence isn't compatible
The relevant OSM wiki page that explains what would someone suggesting a new import need to do is here. With regard to the "community buy-in" step, I'd suggest contacting the OSM USA community in the first instance via the forum, mailing list or OSM US' slack workspace.
Related
I want to know if there is any way to get a city/suburb/postal code's outer boundary coordinates, so as to be able to draw a polygon on the map.
I have read through the google maps API documentation (Places, Maps, and Routes) and I can't find anywhere where they provide this information.
Native in google maps if you search for a city google maps will draw a polygon around the city edges. Drawing the polygon is not the issue I just want to know how to get the polygon points for any given location.
I have searched and all the available answers are either very old or provided only a community maintained polygon database, that is not guaranteed to have your location mapped.
So my question is, do google maps APIs expose some function to get these coordinates, or is there some reputable well maintained service where this information can be obtained from?
I am using it in a flutter applicant making use of google_maps_flutter.
These are some of the resources and other links I found but seem dated.
Resource 1
Resource 2
Googles Docs
Please please help.
I'm not sure that the Google Maps API offers this functionality, but I trust that you've dug through enough of their documentation to find that they don't.
I suggest looking at Nominatim, which queries data from OSM (OpenStreetMap). They're free to use and community-driven - which can be both awesome and scary (eg. you can't assume "permanent ID"s for the things you query)
Relevant Links:
https://nominatim.org/release-docs/latest/api/Overview/
https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/ui/search.html
Otherwise, you could also try looking for other tools that allow you to download datasets of boundary coordinates (eg: GADM) but you'd have to find one that has the level of granularity you need and read up on their usage policies (most disallow use for commercial purposes).
Unfortunately the world of GIS and digital cartography is one that can get pretty complicated and that I'm no expert in, but I hope this helps somewhat.
Listing other resources I've found that are rather outdated, but could still be helpful:
Google Maps how to Show city or an Area outline
Add "Search Area" outline onto google maps result
Currently I am trying to develop a multi-layered Leaflet map using GeoJSON (for country, states/provinces) and CSV (for city data). I want it to go down all the way to city level and that requires layers of Country, State/Province, and City data. I have all the Country data I need in the format I require (GeoJSON) and I have a decent source for City data in a CSV format.
However, I only have USA, Canada, Brazil, and Australian states/provinces and I have been looking around but haven't been able to find a reliable source such as NaturalEarth (which is where I initially got my states/province data from).
Does anyone have a resource they could point me towards? Even if it is multiple, hopefully I can merge them together in mapshaper/other open source applications. I've been looking for the past month but I am new to geographic visualization so I don't know the good spots to look yet.
Thank you so much for any help
You can try BBBike exports of OpenStreetMap data. Probably you will have to export bit by bit as there is a size limit to what you can export.
I recommend you also OpenStreet map. Osm also uses NaturalEarth for higher layers.
But I would download their database (for test, just download a small country, then you can download continents at a time).
Then I would select the features I'm interested. In your case the boundaries (region, districts, cities/municipalities), and city/hamlets names. Then you should look at the tools they have (and what you need). My simple and stupid way would be just to import such features in a GIS database, and then use it to get data. But you may find shortcuts and use directly the data without importing in a database.
Check OSM wiki, Downloading data and Planet.osm page, and other linked pages about tools. You may need to look the Feature page to known what features you want (just to discard most of the data).
If you want to use the tiles (pre-rendered images), you may need to read the term of services. It may be easier to download all data and render in your server, or to buy a service which offer you tiles. (all in the wiki).
Not getting much luck tracking this down through their official support channels.
Does MapBox have known data quality issues in certain geographies.
Take for example the following address in Hong Kong
12 Cloud View Road, Hong Kong
Google Maps has no problem finding this location by this address
Mapbox on the other hand, does not find it. See: https://docs.mapbox.com/search-playground/#
I've tried numerous things including specifying the Country/WorldView filtering options, but still no joy. And I can't find anything in the mapbox documentaiton that talks about coverage of various nations or address languages.
I need to make a decision on whether to go with Google Maps (significantly more expensive for our needs) vs. MapBox (doesn't seem to support what we require in certain territories).
Is there an offline Map layer available for Leaflet? I don't need in detail, but basic geometry would be sufficient.
For sure you can set up your own offline map (raster tiles and/or vector shapes). The difficulty or out-of-the-box availability depends on what kind of information and level of details you want.
GeoJSON:
The easiest is if you need just world countries borders with little detail, just to get the outline. In that case, you can find GeoJSON files on Internet that contain that data for a few hundreds kB (the weight of a single normal big image), e.g. https://github.com/johan/world.geo.json
Then simply use L.geoJson(geoJsonData).addTo(map) to have it shown.
Demo: http://plnkr.co/edit/aB6p7IC2cF7xW41Ju8m7?p=preview
Downloaded tiles:
A more complex (technically and contractually) but still manageable situation is if you want raster tiles (like the OSM website for example). You can download tiles (which are just normal images) from an online server, then use them offline. This is called "tiles scraping" or "tiles bulk downloading".
As for the technical side (you may have to download thousands of individual images, depending on to which zoom level / details you want to use offline), several software are available (have a look at the above OSM Wiki link).
As for the contractual side, many tile servers (including OSM for instance) specifically require in their Terms of Use not to perform bulk downloading (as it generates high demand and uses high bandwidth on their servers). So you should look for a service that accepts this usage.
Render tiles locally:
A perfectly authorized solution (but the most technically complex) is to download the raw OSM data, and to use it through software to generate your map (whether raster tiles or vector shapes).
You can probably find services on Internet that offer to download simplified OSM data (the full database for the entire planet is ~30 GB compressed…) or for a small geographic area (see the above OSM Wiki link).
Regarding the software, the link provided by chrki in the question comment (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Rendering) should get you started.
In particular, you can very well generate raster tiles once, save them and get rid of the rendering software, so you can use those tiles as if you had scraped them.
You can build your own local osm server. It is quite easy using Ubuntu, because there is special packages for it. Installation process is described on this great resource: switch2osm.org
Here is an example using NeDB and modifications to this project/examples https://github.com/tbicr/OfflineMap: https://github.com/KD0NKS/APRSViewJS/blob/master/js/techpire/LayerManager.js. This only caches what the user has already viewed and avoids bulk downloading from osm servers.
There is also a Leaflet Plugin: https://github.com/MazeMap/Leaflet.TileLayer.PouchDBCached
I am trying to help witth rescue operations in Nepal.
I have setup a Google Form here and that information gets stored on a Google Sheet.
Now, I want to provide a map (OSM) that would autopopulate using data in the Google Sheet (there is a column with GPS coordinates.
Is this currently do-able? It would be ideal if I could provide an endpoint where various OSM maps could get the Google Sheet information from.
Thanks in advance.
You can use Leaflet or OpenLayers to place markers and popups on top of OSM maps. uMap might also be worth looking at.
Additionally there is also the Humanitarian OSM Team (HOT) doing various tasks for helping the Nepal rescue teams. The 2015 Nepal earthquake wiki contains an overview, guidelines and specific tasks. It might be useful to discuss your ideas with HOT.
In short, no. I've been in communication with Google about this. It's currently not a feature, and they have no plans to add this feature in the future.
And I, for one, desperately need such a feature! I'd imagine if thousands of us flooded Google with requests for this feature -- maybe they'd add it?