Fossgis: creating maps with open street map in QGis - Axel Heinemann¶

Tags: fossgis, geo, python

(One of my summaries of a talk at the 2017 fossgis conference).

He wanted to make a map for a local run. He wanted a nice map with the route and the infrastructure (start, end, parking, etc). Instead of the usual not-quite-readable city plan with a simple line on top. With qgis and openstreetmap he should be able to make something better!

A quick try with QGis, combined with the standard openstreetmap base map, already looked quite nice, but he wanted to do more customizations on the map colors. So he needed to download the openstreetmap data. That turned into quite a challenge. He tried two plugins:

• OSMDownloader: easy selection, quick download. Drawback: too many objects as you cannot filter. The attribute table is hard to read.

• QuickOSM: key/value selection, quick. Drawback: you need a bit of experience with the tool, as it is easy to forget key/values.

He then landed on https://overpass-turbo.eu . The user interface is very friendly. There is a wizard to get common cases done. And you can browse the available tags.

With the data downloaded with overpass-turbo, he could easily adjust colors and get a much nicer map out of it.

You can get it to work, but it takes a lot of custom work.

Some useful links:

https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org http://tagfinder.herokuapp.com https://gis.stackexchange.com

Photo explanation: just a nice unrelated picture from the recent beautiful ‘on traxs’ model railway exibition (see video )