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OpenStreetMap and open data talk at Fosdem 2023

Hi ! My name is Céline, and I am on a mission to bring more open data into OSRD. To do so, I searched open data that can fit OSRD’s needs in every country of the European Union (+ Norway, United Kingdom and Switzerland).

I have presented the main results of this study during a talk at the FOSDEM 2023 meeting, and you can see the replay on their website.

In this post I will go into details of the methodology I followed, feel free to contact me if you have any remarks or question :-)

Data download

You can download the detailed data I created here.

The file is composed of three tabs:

  • EU-sources: links to download each country’s open data & info on license compatibility
  • EU-data: data used to compare total track length between countries and source and to compute the “usability indicator”
  • EU-epsg: EPSG code used for reprojecting geographical data for each country

Compare total track length

Calculate track length from open data

  • Look for open data sources

  • If a source is found, look for data license

  • Check license compatibility with OpenStreetMap using OSM wiki and this blog post

  • Download open data

  • Load data into QGIS and reproject it based on the EU-epsg tab

  • Calculate a new field using the following formula to get the length of each track in kilometers:

      "length" = $length / 1000

  • Report total length using the “Basic Statistics for Fields” tool

Learn more about Inspire data model

Calculate track length for OpenStreetMap data

  • Download last OSM export from https://download.geofabrik.de/europe.html

  • Load lines data into QGIS

  • Select data using the “other_tags” field to select railway network:

      "other_tags" like '%"railway"=>"rail"%'
  or "other_tags" like '%"railway"=>"narrow_gauge"%'
  or "other_tags" like '%"railway"=>"light_rail"%'

  • Export selected objects and reproject the layer based on the EU-epsg tab

  • Calculate a new field using the following formula to get the length of each track in kilometers:

      "length" = $length / 1000

  • Select electrified parts of the network using the “other_tages” field:

      "other_tags" like '%"electrified"=>"yes"%'
  or "other_tags" like '%"electrified"=>"contact_line"%'
  or "other_tags" like '%"electrified"=>"rail"%'

  • Report total length using the Basic Statistics for Fields tool

Learn more about OpenStreetMap data model

Calculate usability indicator

  • List required and optional data
  • For each data, indicate its availability using QGIS (Overpass Turbo can also be helpful to check OSM data) and the following scale :
    • “Yes”: fully available
    • “Partial”: not available everywhere on the country, or missing parts of the data
    • “No”: not available
  • Sum total required and optional data with Yes = 1; Partial = 0.5; No = 0
  • Generate indicator:
    • “Good” if required=2 and optional>2
    • “Okay” if required >1 and optional >=0
    • “Poor” if required=1 and optional >2
    • “Not usable” else

Map the result

To show the indicator and license compatibility on a map, use the Eurostat borders datasets (for my presentation, I have used the 1:20 million scale and EPSG:3035) and join the table using countries names.

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