Category: All

I created a couple of OSM visualisations for my talk at the OSGeo Ireland conference.

See: History of OpenStreetMap in Ireland

These are pretty easy to make, but take a fair bit of time. I did mine for Ireland, but should work with any part of the world.

Required software:

• PostgreSQL with PostGIS
• Python
• QGIS
• osmium-tools

This is the trickiest part, installing osmium-tools: here.

Data:

An OSM full history export. The best source for these is GEOFABRIK.

For Ireland:

http://download.geofabrik.de/europe/ireland-and-northern-ireland.html

Due to GDPR, you will have to log in with an OSM id to download the full history extracts. User ID’s are personal data.

Process:

The workflow is pretty simple. Osmium-tools provides pretty easy API access to the history files, where you can provide a data, and it will extract what OSM was like at that date. We simply need to loop through the desired dates we want to extract, and pipe the results into a workflow that loads the data into PostgreSQL. The final step is simply rendering in QGIS using the time manager plugin.

Python Script:

Github GIST:

https://gist.github.com/HeikkiVesanto/f01ea54cca499a6a144d18cf8909c940

The tables in the database will be:

• lines
• multilinestrings
• multipolygons
• other_relations
• points

Each feature will be tagged with the date it is associated with.

Visualisation:

To visualise the data in QGIS we use simply use the excellent time manager plugin, filtering on the load_date field and with a monthly interval.

Result: