SRTM Plugin for OpenStreetMap

One of the features of our TrafficMining Project at the LMU was to use additional attributes in routing queries. Standart routing queries usually just use time and distance for calculating the fastest/shortest routes. In order to have an additional attribute we decided to use evelation data as this might be an issue if you also want to take fuel cost into account or if you’re planning a bike tour (instead of crossing a hill, you might want to consider a longer tour that avoids crossing the hill).

The problem just was that data nodes from OpenStreetMap are defined mostly by id, latitude and longitude, which is totally enough for painting 2D maps and standard routing queries. As the elevation is not added to OpenStreetMap data directly (and it is also not intended to be added to the OSM data base), a component was needed that parses both Nasa SRTM data as well as OSM data files in order to combine the data.

In the first version, we parsed the SRTM data directly and addied it to the nodes of the OSM-Graph directly. During one refactoring, we decided to integtrate Osmosis into the project in order to be able to read PBF files (another OpenStreetMap file format). During this integration we decided to separate the SRTM parsing into a separate module so that other people can make use of it as well. The plugin was open sourced some time ago at google code as the “osmosis-srtm-plugin” under an LGPL licence.

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3 thoughts on “SRTM Plugin for OpenStreetMap”

  1. Way cool! Some extremely valid points! I appreciate you penning this write-up
    plus the rest of the site is also very good.

  2. Hey,

    I have been struggling for 2 days on the installation of the SRTM plugin. I’ve successfully installed osmosis on my ubuntu 12.04 but I can’t install the SRTM plugin. I’m quite beginner with linux based systems and can’t get hold of how to compile/install the plugin.

    Thanks in advance.

    1. Unfortunately I cannot provide a lot of support. Please refer to the osmosis page how to use plugins in osmosis. Maybe the osmosis guys also have a mailinglist / forum for assistance.

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