[OSM-talk] Railway Data for Europe?

[Peter Miller]

On 10 Jan 2009, at 00:08, Michal Migurski wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm working on a project that involves a rail map of Europe. I'm
> curious if anyone has a sense for the overall quality of OSM's coarse,
> intercity rail coverage for Europe? Has there been any mass import of
> a single, large, free dataset that would make it possible to render a
> convincing rail network map for the whole continent at a fairly low
> resolution? (e.g. zoom level 5 or 6 in terms of tiles)

Here are some images we have created - a few of them today in response  
to your query, others in the past few weeks.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/itoworld/tags/railway/

There are some places where there certainly appear to be gaps and I  
have suggested that people add notes to the images where they see  
them, or indeed possibly they should add them to OpenStreetBugs (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Openstreetbugshttp://www.flickr.com/photos/itoworld/tags/railway/ 
)

It would also be very interesting for someone to get hold of the  
European train timetable and do a check to see how many stations are  
missing and for how many services there are not suitable routes - This  
could probably be done by a university legally and they should be able  
to publish the resulting map without getting into licence problems -  
Possibly a company could also do that - not sure about that, but UCL  
did a comparison of OSM and OS data in the UK and determined that this  
was ok from an OS licence perspective.
http://povesham.wordpress.com/2008/08/19/openstreetmap-quality-evalution-and-other-comparisons/

It is my experience elsewhere that it is only when the quality tools  
are in place that people are able, and motivated, to do the completion  
of the dataset.


Regards,



Peter

>
>
> -mike.
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> michal migurski- mike at stamen.com
>                  415.558.1610
>
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