Shapefile Archive - Blog

The enviroCar Team recently built a new platform for managing transportation data in the form of “tracks”. A simple but extensible JSON encoding supports the quick prototyping approach within the architecture of the data server, Android app for data collection, and PHP-based website for visualization and social interaction. As the project matures, we encounter new requirements. One of these is to enable users to download the track data in formats that simplify data import to other tools, such as mapping software (e.g. ArcGIS) or tabular analysis software (e.g. Excel spreadsheets), so that scientists and citizens alike can derive new findings and develop new information products based on the enviroCar data.

No sooner said than done, we developed and now publicly release two new export formats, shapefile and CSV! more >

The culmination of 13 long and arduous weeks as part of Google Summer of Code 2012 has produced a new prototype feature within Web Processing Service: the ability to take OpenStreetMap data and transform it on the fly into other GIS formats.

What does this mean?

We can now directly interface with OpenStreetMap servers (Overpass API) such that we can send custom queries for map data retrieval, and have it returned not as OSM XML files, but rather any GIS format that is supported by WPS. This is demonstrable through the WPS test client on the demo server. Here is a breakdown of the features implemented:

Standard conversion of existing OSM XML files into other GIS formats (basic GML, KML, and Shapefiles)
On-the-fly conversion of Overpass API output into other GIS formats
- Option for OSM passthrough
- Option for any of the GIS formats supported by WPS as output
- Option to show original Overpass query

Currently there are two sample algorithms that are bundled in this project:

A sample implementation of a Bounding Box algorithm for retrieving specific areas of the OpenStreetMap planet.osm
A generic implementation that takes any string query and sends it to the Overpass server, and retrieves the result for processing

This allows for adventurous developers to go in and create their own custom algorithms for WPS that interface directly with OpenStreetMap.

Some videos of this in action are available here:

More details on installation, configuration, and development can be found on the wiki page for this project.

Comments and Future work

Of course, this is probably not the end. There exist many avenues of future work, some of which I have thought of during the process of development, and some which have been suggested to me. A short list of what would be useful next steps:more >

GIS data access for enviroCar

On-demand transformation of OpenStreetMap Data into common GIS formats