[OSM-talk] MXD for OSM data?

[Jukka Rahkonen]

Iván Sánchez Ortega <ivan <at> sanchezortega.es> writes:

> El Lunes, 18 de Enero de 2010, Martijn van Exel escribió:
> > Someone asked me for an ESRI MXD file for OSM data. Does such a thing
> > exist?
> 
> Short answer: no.
> 
> > Does the question even make sense? I'm not very good at ESRI lingo, 
> > but apparently it's some kind of stylesheet.
> 
> Long answer: a .mxd file is a "project" file. It's nothing but a bunch of 
> links to data files (or database connections, or WMS/WFS links), and 
> the "stylesheets" applied to each one, plus the layering order, plus 
> (optionally) VB scripts embedded in the project file.
> 
> A .mxd file is not data. And OSM is All About The Data(tm).

Well, I can see whole lot of stuff that is not just data in
http://trac.openstreetmap.org/browser/applications

In theory it would be nice have a place for sharing project files for ArcMap,
MapInfo, OpenJUMP, uDig, QGis and other GIS softwares as well as SLD files for
WMS servers. In real life I fear that would not make much sense because styling
is tied to certain kind of data and GIS programs can't read the native OSM
format directly and OSM project does not deliver data in well known GIS formats.
The Mapnik chain is kind of exception because OSM project delivers both
osm2pgsql program that imports OSM data into conventional GIS tables in the
PostGIS database and Mapnik stylesheet for rendering the converted data.

Hosting project files and style files migh suit better for Geofabrik and
Cloudmade who also deliver OSM shapefiles. Probably as a paid service because as
a result people would start asking "Why do my edits not show on the map I render
from Cloudmade shapefiles with uDig?".