OSM data: buildings, land use, points of interest, roads, transport facilities (all-in-one)

The OpenStreetMap (OSM) project (www.openstreetmap.org) has collected an enormous amount of free spatial data and the database is growing every day. Many people want to use this data for their own GIS projects but have been hindered by the use of a non-standard data format in the OSM project. This document describes a mapping from OSM data formats to the usual GIS formats to make the OSM data accessible to more people.

The mapping from OSM data to other formats is not an exact science. OSM rules on how to map certain features are often not well defined and there is no mandatory quality control. This openness allows a lot of flexibility and is part of the reason why OSM has been able to collect so much data in such a short time frame, but it makes using the data more difficult. When using or exporting the data, many decisions have to be made on how to extract the different features into something usable for the task at hand.