OpenGeoHub Summer School 2023

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a free and openly editable map of the world. Like
Wikipedia and unlike government or corperation maintained datasets, OSM
is created and maintained by a community of volunteers, making it the
premier decentralized and fastest evolving source of geographic vector
data focussed on features relevant to human activity (e.g. roads,
buildings, cafes) on planet Earth. Unlike Wikipedia, every data point in
OSM has a geographic location and attributes must be structured as
key-value pairs. OSM is a rich source of data for geocomputational
research, but the decentralized nature of the project and the sheer
volume of data. ‘Planet.osm’ now has more nodes than there are people on
Earth, with more than 8 billion
nodes, and the rate of data
creation is increasing as the community grows, to 10 million
users in early 2023. The
size and rapid evolution of OSM are great strengths, democratising
geographic knowledge and ensuring resilience. However, these features
can make it difficult to work with OSM data.

This lecture will provide an introduction to working with OSM and will
cover the following:

• How and where to download OSM data
• How to process small amounts of OSM data using the osmdata R package
• How to process large OSM ‘extracts’ data with the osmextract R
  package
• Other command line tools for working with OSM data, including the
  mature and widely used osmium tool, the pyrosm Python package and
  the osm2streets web
  application and Rust codebase

Finally, the lecture will outline ideas for using OSM data. It will
conclude with a call to action, inspiring the use of this rich resource
to support policy objectives such as the fast and fair decarbonisation
of the global economy as societies transition away from inefficient,
polluting and costly fossil fuels.