[OSM-talk] OSMCoastline / OpenStreetMapData.com

[Jochen Topf]

Hi!

In the last months I have been working on a program that extracts coastlines
(ways tagged natural=coastline) from the planet file and processes them.  It
does a similar job as the coastcheck program that was used before for this
task, but it is easier to use, much faster (minutes instead of hours) and it
can do more.

It creates land and water polygons and linestrings for the coastline. It
corrects small errors in the data before doing that. It also generates tables
with problems in the data, you can use those to fix them. (I have fixed
hundreds of problems in the last months and the coastline currently is in
a pretty good shape, but new problems are added each day...) Optionally
large polygons and linestrings are split, to make them easier and faster
to handle (Eurasafrica is one polygon with more than 4 million points).

Of course this software is Open Source, you can find it at 
https://github.com/joto/osmcoastline . The Wiki page
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSMCoastline is currently just a stub
and needs some more work.

Because not everybody has a planet file lying around and because the software
with all its options is still not so easy to use, I have created a new
service at OpenStreetMapData.com where you can download the files created
by OSMCoastline. The data is updated daily.

Some more background in my blog:
http://blog.jochentopf.com/tags-osmcoastline.html

Jochen
-- 
Jochen Topf  jochen at remote.org  http://www.remote.org/jochen/  +49-721-388298