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Stefan edited this page Dec 18, 2016 · 6 revisions

General

Q: Is OSMaxx free and is there a premium plan?

Yes, OSMaxx get's you free access to OpenStreetMap (OSM) data given you grant access with your OpenStreetMap account. And yes, there's a premium plan which costs CHF 100.- per year. Premium users get prioritized processing (in case of heavy load) as well as mail support. Users can make a request by a mail to geometalab(at)hsr.ch to get a premium plan.

Q: How long does it take to process an export?

The processong of an export takes from 10 minutes to few hours. This is depending on size of the export and the work load of other processes a well as the internal resource limitations (in fact, it's already a 'fat' server we're using). Users get mail (if provided) when processing is finished. Note that we're not throttling processing ot free users exports - OSMaxx is just in heavy demand!

Q: How up-to-date is the OpenStreetMap data exported?

There's an update cycle of about one day at OSMaxx backend. There's following hint for GIS users: There's an "lastchange" on every table (layer/feature class). So 1. Open data set e.g. in QGIS/ArcGIS, 2. Choose e.g. table "road_l" (or "poi_p"), 3. Open "Attribute Table", 4. Sort according to "lastchange" descending. Now the most recent entry apears on top.

Q: Are there alternatives to OSMaxx?

We don't know of any web application which is as sophisticated as OSMaxx. But look yourself at following web page OSM Wiki.

Data Related

Q: What do you mean by 2.5D?

OSM data is 2D data accompanied with additional height and/or spatial shape and material information. OSM is "data driven" vector data with a topological geometry model. There's no wireframe but there are attributes like the height of a building, the building-levels or the roof type and orientation of a building.

Q: What typical other map data is missing in OSMaxx?

  • No digtial terrain model data. That could come from a separate data source.
  • No satellite imagery. Thats a raster data source different from OSM and vector.
  • No user ratings of POIs (restaurants). That's not belonging to the principles and philosophy of OSM.

Q: What are the known limitations of OSMaxx?

  • The download data size is restricted to ~700 MB.
  • No geocoding: There's table address_p which contains housenumber attribute and mostly street name. But geocoding (and routing) is much more than that. See our project OSMNames. There's limited possibility to collect all name tags in order to ge a geoname search.
  • No routing (except Garmin format): Routing (and geocoding) requires much more sophisticated processing of OSM data. In the meantime use Garmin format or look e.g. at project OSRM.
  • No editing: Editing means reading the whole information about an entity/object and conserving the original data structure and information. That's not the case in OSMaxx since it's goal (and unique selling point) is to restructure the OSM data in order to make it manageable by GIS systems.
  • For bugs, known issues see the OSMaxx Issues page here.

Developers

Q: Is there any public API for OSMaxx?

  • No. We're open for any proposals, pull request or funding.