International Data
OpenStreetMap offers regularly-updated extracts of continents, countries, and selected cities. It is an open source website that provides open map data from user contributions (not official sources). While this allows for data to be updated more quickly, the type of data available for each location varies. Therefore, you must first check if the data you need is available on OSM's website. If OSM does not have the data you need, please talk to a staff member.
- Open a web browser and go to http://www.openstreetmap.org/.
- Zoom in to your desired location.
- Check if the spatial data you need (roads, building footprints, etc.) is available for that location.
Now that you have ensured that the data is available, you can extract the data using one of two methods. Read the descriptions below to decide which of the two methods is appropriate for your project.
Direct Extraction
This method extracts OSM data in 3 shapefiles: lines, polygons, and points. This is useful if you need all of OSM's data or are unsure of which data you need.
- In ArcMap, zoom in to your area of interest using a basemap. OSM limits extraction to 50,000 nodes. The images below can be used as reference to estimate the number of nodes in different-sized regions on a basemap. If the area you need is bigger than the 50,000 node limit, you can extract multiple tiles and merge them.
Area of around 50,000 nodes.
Area of around 25,000 nodes.
Area of around 5,000 nodes.