Meran - Merano
V・T・E Meran/Merano, Italy  |
| latitude: 46.6674, longitude: 11.1635 |
| Browse map of Meran/Merano 46°40′02.64″ N, 11°09′48.60″ E |
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Meran/Merano is a city in Italy at latitude 46°40′02.64″ North, longitude 11°09′48.60″ East.
Merano (Italian) or Meran (German) has the distinction of being the first municipality to liberate their data for use in OpenStreetMap.
November 18 Mapping Party
On November 18 (2007?), User:Mikel held a mapping party in the hills North of Meran/o, the day after the South Tyrol Free Software Conference and the day before the OSGeo European Code Sprint. More details in this blog post.
Merano City Data
We didn't map the town because of the unprecedented donation of the municipality's GIS data! This goes way beyond roads, including 3d models and orthophotos.
Layer 9, which contains the road network, can be downloaded here: Layer 9. Other layers (buildings, landcover, rivers) can be found here: download.gfoss.it. If you are interested in other aspects of the data, get in touch .. it's a quite large DVD image.
There are folks working on translating this data into OSM format, but just for completeness, here's some rough instructions on what that process would involve.
Attached is the shapefile of "Layer 9", which is the street network of Merano. This one has been reprojected into WGS84, for OSM; the original is UTM. The main task of the transformation in mapping to the OSM data model. In OSM, each lat/long is an object called a "node". A "way" is a collection of nodes, which can represent a single street. There are "tags" on ways (and on nodes if needed) which are key/value pairs that describe properties of nodes (highway=motorway, name=Main St). Mutliple ways can share the same node -- these are intersections. This Shapefile has a different representation. Each feature is a portion of a single street between two intersections. There is a field "ID_STRASSE", which is a unique ID for collecting the seperate features into a single entity. There is a TEXT_I for the Italian name, and TEXT_D for the German name. The main task in processing the Shapefile is to first make all the lat/long pairs in LINESTRINGs into node object. Then make each feature refer to these nodes, rather than lat/long pairs (so now streets will be sharing nodes at intersections). Then multiple features with the same ID_STRASSE need to be brought together, in order, into a single "way". Finally, some tags need to be applied. Since Layer 9 doesn't have road classification, we'll set all to highway=unclassified for the initial import. TEXT_I becomes name:it, and TEXT_D becomes name:de. "name" itself can be "TEXT_D/TEXT_I".
Layer 9 has been converted using an adapted version of mass_to_osm.py by Chris Schmidt. The new script can be downloaded here(dead link) together with input and output data. Note that the original shapefile was re-organized and names corrected to return a clean OSM file.
Merano City Data License
A copy of the Merano City Data License
In English
Subject: DVD – Merano data
Hereby attached is a copy of the DVD containing the following data for Merano:
* Ortophotos (year 2001)
* digital terrain model
* vector map in Shapefile format, design according to
specifications by the "Consorzio dei Comuni"
The data may be used freely, modified and re-distributed, provided
that the source of the data is referenced as "Comune di Merano,
Ufficio Urbanistica, Servizio GIS".
Should the data be modified, an indication that the data are a
modification of data originally from Comune di Merano will have to be
provided.
Best regards