[Talk-us] How to get open street maps

[ajt1047 at gmail.com]

On 28/05/2016 11:51, David Niklas wrote:
> Hello,
> I downloaded the maps, but they changed over night, so the md5 sums don't
> match up. I tried using rsync -cav to ftp.spline.de, but the connection
> times out "[Receiver] io timeout after 181 seconds -- exiting" (return
> code 30) I know that the port is accessible because I used nmap on it. I
> tried passing the --timeout flags but that made no difference. What could
> I do? I can't download that much data from scratch and a subset of the
> world cannot be resynced with the master?

What to download depends very much on what you want to do.  It sounds 
like you're trying to download the whole planet from a mirror of 
http://planet.osm.org/ (see also 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Planet.osm ).

If you want OSM data for a small country or region, then I'd start with 
one of the extracts mentioned at those links. 
http://download.geofabrik.de/ is a good start because you can see what 
you're getting and how big it's going to be.

If you really do want OSM data for the whole planet then have a look at 
http://planet.osm.org/planet/2016/ for how often they change - that 
should enable you to time the download of a whole one before it gets 
replaced with a new version (or go for a particular date rather than 
"latest").  It's 50Gb though, so as well as taking a while to download 
it'll take a while to do anything useful with once you have downloaded it.

However if you really do want "maps" rather than "data", then where to 
go depends on what you want maps for.  For example, various maps that 
are suitable for a Garmin handheld or satnav are available (such as 
http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl/ , see 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_Map_On_Garmin/Download ), but 
they won't work with (say) MAPS.ME or OsmAnd on a phone.

If you instead want all the examples of a particular tag* in OSM, then 
you can start with something like 
http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/railway=station and click through 
to see that on a map by clicking the "Overpass Turbo" link there (and 
get that data as JSON by clicking the "data" link at the top right).

The best place for general "How do I do X" questions is probably the 
help site https://help.openstreetmap.org/ .

Best Regards,

Andy

* and see http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Elements for more info 
about that.