Humanitarian Web Mapping

Using OSM

If you're interested in using OSM data more widely, you can download the traced objects (not the satellite images) easily by going to the Open Street Map website, zooming to the area you are interested in, and pressing the "Export" button at the top of the page. This will download a ".osm" file. You can find out how to download larger datasets on the OSM wiki.

You can read about the licensing and copyright on the OSM copyright page.

In terms of using the data in a GIS, ArcGIS 9 will open .osm files directly – just open ArcMap and open the datafile using the "+" icon. In QGIS you can either connect directly to OSM, or open downloaded data. Details for other GIS are on the OSM wiki.

You can also embed OSM data into your own website. For an extensive introduction to web-based mapping, see our Web-based GIS course. If you're already familiar with Javascript and HTML, you can skip straight to the starter tutorial for Leaflet which uses OSM data.