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Does Open Street Map have an input API? or Upload feature?

Posted by searain on 22 June 2016 in English.

For example, a lot of cities have the city open data, such as http://data.vancouver.ca/datacatalogue/index.htm.

And many city datasets are with geo locations. Such as public washrooms etc. Instead of let the user add one spot one time manually to open street.

Does open street allow csv files uploading or does open street map has an input api that users/developers can submit data through?

If not yet, does open street map have projects or plans to develop these input features?

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Discussion

Comment from denizzz on 22 June 2016 at 15:16

osm.wiki/Legal_FAQ

Comment from SomeoneElse on 22 June 2016 at 15:26

There’s also information over at osm.wiki/Import and osm.wiki/Import/Guidelines .

Comment from searain on 22 June 2016 at 15:36

denizzz, thanks for the quick response.

A few more questions.

  1. Legal question: Local government open data like city open data, these should be considered as very open and free, of course, we would read each cities’ disclaimer. Could someone explain more why we can not or we can upload the city data to open street? Or could some experience users with legal knowledge expertise offer helps here if other users posted their cities’ open data license agreements here and advise that if we can use it or not?
  2. Technical question: I am new here. I was wondering if openstreetmap has a csv upload feature, and a input api (I saw osm has output api) to accept json/xml etc data input (of course, osm will have defined fields/formats for the mass input data. Even for osm users self surveyed data, that will be wonderful. OSM users would have some developers in them. They would be interested in developing a survey tool or a survey mobile apps that OSM users can use to collect data and then feed the data to OSM through the upload and input API in batch.
  3. More, does OSM have plan to develop a OSM map survey app (with the input apis setup first), that will be even better?

Thanks!

Comment from searain on 22 June 2016 at 15:57

Thanks! SomeoneElse, I should spend time to go through all the documents. I was excited and hurry to jump in uploading data.

Comment from Christian Ledermann on 22 June 2016 at 17:29

have a look at: http://schools.mapthe.uk/ and https://github.com/cleder/os-opendata-edubase

Comment from SOSM on 22 June 2016 at 17:48

Any bulk import has to be compatible with our distribution licence AND digestible and maintainable by the local community. The history of OpenStreetMap is littered with failed imports many of which have not been cleaned up for years.

And it is OpenStreetMap … thanks.

Comment from Hjart on 22 June 2016 at 21:43

You are obviously very,very new to OSM (you didn’t even make any edits yet). I recommend making at least a few (using iD) doing anything else and that you do not even consider importing anything before having considerable experience doing ordinary edits.

Comment from joost schouppe on 23 June 2016 at 15:49

Many new contributors like you have wanted to jump in by importing. The most important thing to realize is that most OSM data is handcrafted by volunteers who do this because they like doing it. Most external data is made by people payed to do it. You will find that OSM data might be sparse and incomplete, but the quality of what is there is phenomenal. Most of the time, external data will be either of bad quality or evaluated to really different quality measures. In practice, that means you will either need a complicated technical solution, or will just be able to use external data as a starting point. Either way, it is a bit more complicated than feeding an API.

OSM is not a collection of geographic features but an integrated database of things with a spatial component. For well defined things, it might be more efficient to look elsewhere. For example, for address databases, there’s this project.

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