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faq 71532553

Billy Charlton edited this page Sep 5, 2018 · 2 revisions

Can one get a non-rectangular area from OSM?

by Kai Nagel on 2016-07-04 19:06:43


(kn proxying for Rolf Moeckel)

  • When we downloaded the network from OSM, we were only able to select a square that covers our study area. Do you know of a way to select only those links that are covered by our (non-square-shaped) study area?

Comments: 2


Re: Can one get a non-rectangular area from OSM?

by Johan W. Joubert on 2016-07-05 05:55:20

Rolf, yes you can. Probably not from a GUI like JOSM, but on the command line it is quite possible (after checking: JOSM has a poly plugin that allows you to deal with polygons too). The documentation is available here. You need to define a polygon (which may even have holes in them): the documentation is quite clear on the format of the file. Say the polygon is called 'myArea.poly' then the terminal command for osmosis would be

osmosis --read-xml file="planet-latest.osm" --bounding-polygon file="myArea.poly" --write-xml file="myArea.osm"

Re: Can one get a non-rectangular area from OSM?

by Marcel Rieser on 2016-07-05 06:08:42

You could try http://extract.bbbike.org. As format, select "OSM XML gzip'd". After that, you'll see the text "Then click <here> to create the bounding box". Click on that "here", and after that you can change the size of the rectangle and also add additional points to create a polygon.

The total size of the extract to be generated might be limited, but for smaller areas this export is still suitable.

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