Free Geography Tools

A while back, I posted on GeoFabrik’s repository of Open Street Map (OSM) data in shapefile format, covering mainly Europe and parts of Asia. CloudMade now has this data freely available for download as well, but not just in shapefile format, and not just Europe, but every continent (including Antarctica). Broken down by country/state, you can download:

• OSM XML extracts
• Garmin Map Files (OSM.err edition)
• Osmosis country bounding polygon
• Shapefile extracts
• Navit maps
• GPX POI
• TomTom POI

The latter two are a bit lacking in data now, to put it mildly, but presumably will grow in size with time. CloudMade is developing APIs to deliver the OSM map data in web and mobile format, but these are currently in alpha and limited to developers.

The Garmin data comes as a gmapsupp.img file, which you can copy directly to the SD/microSD card of a compatible Garmin unit; see this post for more info. The problem with Garmin map data in this format is that you are limited to having only the data embedded within that single file loaded into your GPS; you can’t combine it directly with other Garmin mapsets. And because the gmapsupp.img file can contain multiple sub-tiles, you can’t add it to the MapSource program using MapSet Toolkit; trying to do so will only make a single sub-tile visible. But there’s a way to split that gmapsupp.img file into its constituent sub-tiles, making it installable into MapSource, and I’ll cover that in tomorrow’s post.

Actual screenshot

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Actual screenshot