Hallo, I’m a French consultant in spatial information, and I don’t speak german, sorry.
So, I will go on in english, sorry, and I hope that you will forgive me!
As Germany is quite more advanced on OSM than France, I would like to know if OSM is professionnaly used by the German local governments (Cities, Landers…). And if it is the case, who could I join in order to have an exchange with him about this experience (or experiment?).
I thank you everybody for your attention.
Serge Mang
The Umweltbundesamt (German Federal Environmental Agency) is using OSM for presentation of data regarding environmental pollution caused by enterprises. To reach the service open [1] and click on the map. They are using own renderings and overlays instead of the known OSM tiles. Unfortunately the tiles seem to be outdated but being send dated the servers response time.
One might also consider to say the state media should count to the governmental services you asked for. You can find an example at [2] where an OSM rendering is used to show the location of the presented article.
I don’t know to whom you should talk to about the mentioned services as I only find very general contact data. Another thing is Germany has (as far as I know) about 17 agencies that provide geo data.
[1] http://www.prtr.bund.de/
[2] http://www.radiobremen.de/politik/nachrichten/politikgesellschaftgrossrazziabremen100.html
Dear Serge,
Welcome on our local board!
No. Each Land has its own geospatial data which is far better than our data. Just have a look at Bayernviewer, Deutschlandviewer, Niedersachsenviewer - that’s a quality we will never be able to reach. However, their data is restricted by copyright.
Our data is intended for private users who don’t want to pay much money for official data. There are some public users as well who use our data for tourism purposes:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/DE:OSM_Internet_Links
As you can see, most of our users are local shopowners like dentists, lawyers, restaurants and schools.
Government agencies are more restrictive to use OSM data because of lacking quality guidelines. Frederik Ramm and Jochen Topf from Geofabrik have discussed with civil servants about that topic, but they usually just look at the German mailing list, not the forum. Compared with mailing list users, forum users are regarded as second-class users (I am proud to be one of them).
Yours, FK270673
Hi Sergemang
We forgive you 
No, we have no roblem in here with english 
What exactly do you mean with “professional usage”? There are a view communes and also the Bundesverfassungsgericht (Federal Constitutional Court) which use them as access route on their Homepage, but it is not used as offical Data for official maps and things like this.
First of all, I would’ like to thank you everybody for your answers. The links were very interesting. This forum is quite active.
I thought about applications used by local authorities, non profit organisations or entreprises based on osm data: the examples you quoted, above all cartographically oriented, were some among any others (spatial analyse, routing, crossing with owned data by interoperability, and s.o.).
What I can see is that osm is professionnally used, indeed, but for the moment, only for localisation (answer to the question: “where are the points I speak about?”), and not for more advanced applications.
But it is already interesting, and I will go on my investigation. I look for testimonies who are pionneers for some osm advanced uses.
I will try to contact the city of Schwerin.
Once again, thank you very much for your answers!
Serge Mang
s.mang@gaiago.fr
Hi,
maybe you should take a look at http://www.geofabrik.de/en/index.html
those people are often to find on the “talk-de” list
jörk