Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Appendix A
Data Covered in the Topic
This topic provides a variety of processing and analysis steps using different types of
geospatial data. In line with its respective chapters, we cover vector and raster data
as well as irregularly spaced point datasets. Here we briefly present the sources of
the data. You are free to download them from their respective sources or from the
book's website.
1
Please use the corresponding acknowledgement and referencing
when using the data for publishing.
A.1 Geospatial Vector Datasets
A.1.1 OpenStreetMap Data
OpenStreetMap (OSM) was created in 2004 by Steve Coast as a collaborative project
to create a free map of the world, which was initially focused on England. OSM is
underpinned by a Wiki-like technology and users can map, contribute and edit data
through the use of handheld GPS units, aerial photography and other free sources of
spatial data. While it provides a similar service to Google Maps and other proprietary
Web-map services, all of the data are licensed under the Open Database License
(ODbL) from the Open Data Commons (see also Fig.
A.1
).
2
This provides users
with the possibility to freely download and re-use the data for their own purposes.
These data are currently being used by online services, such as FlickR, Geocaching
and Craigslist to replace Google Maps.
In the subsequent chapters, we use the OSM data to demonstrate the power and
flexibility of the GDAL/OGR tool set, in particular the chapters dealingwith vectorial
spatial data andOGR. Our examples focus on data that has been extracted for a defined
area of interest, but it is clear that the examples can be repeated using OSM data for
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