1

Hello Everybody,

since a while I am trying to use OSM-Data to create Line-Features that I can watch and edit in ArgGIS (I am using ArgGIS 10 - full licence).
The target is to export Power lines (visible in OSM).
My first idea was to use the OSM-Export-Tool but it seems that the resulting XML-File is not really usefull/compartible with ArgGIS.
Also the XML-File contains all objects (such as buildings, streets etc.) but I only need power lines and power towers. Is there a way to make a selection before exporting?
I was trying and serching a lot and yet I sill dont have a clue how to porceed. So I’d be very
happy if somebody did something like this before or knows how to use OSM-Data in ArcGIS.

Best Regards and thanks for any kind of help
Alex

2

Hi,

You can use GDAL v. 1.10 with the OSM driver http://www.gdal.org/ogr/drv_osm.html
Edit first the driver configuration file “osmconf.ini” so that it includes attribute “power” for the layer “lines” as in this snippet

[lines]

common attributes

osm_id=yes
osm_version=no
osm_timestamp=no
osm_uid=no
osm_user=no
osm_changeset=no

keys to report as OGR fields

attributes=name,highway,waterway,aerialway,barrier,man_made,power

Then you just need to run ogr2ogr utility as

ogr2ogr -f "ESRI Shapefile" power_line.shp -sql "select * from lines  where power is not null" your_data.osm.pbf

The command found 4655 features with some power tag from the 400 MB finland.osm.pbf file in couple of minutes. Rerun with “select * from points where power is not null” for writing the poles into a point shapefile. The points section in the osmconf.ini must be edited to include the power tag first.

3

Hi JRA,

thanks for your answer. As I am not very experienced in OSM I was hoping that
you could give me some more details about GDAL. How is it working, does it have a
user interface? As there exist a lot of downloads at the homepage of GDAL it is
a bit confusing what to use especially if you are new to it. Is it to use like a tool,
that has to be importet to ArcGis (just as tools from the ArcToolbox). Or is it
a independent Tool that produces Outputfiles which can be opened in ArcGis afterwards?
Hope you can give me some more help. Thanks

4

Hi,

GDAL is a general program library and utility package for manipulating raster and vector data. Utility programs are used from command line. They are stand alone programs and in my example I used shapefiles as outputformat because they are most simple to open with ArcGIS. If you are on Windows the easiest way to install GDAL it to download a msi installer from http://gisinternals.com/sdk/Download.aspx?file=release-1600-gdal-mapserver\gdal-110-1600-core.msi (32-bit) or http://gisinternals.com/sdk/Download.aspx?file=release-1600-x64-gdal-mapserver\gdal-110-1600-x64-core.msi (64-bit).

5

Works perfectly fine. Thanks! you safed me a huge load of time