Converting OSM-Files into PostgreSQL-Scripts

Author: René Westerholt (edited by Daniel Kastl)

If you desire to put some data for displaying as an WFS or WMS into your database you will assert, that most of the available tools for doing something like this are not very satisfying. The tool “osm2pgsql” has the fault, that only attributes that are necessary for rendering the map, are imported into your database. If you want to have the attribute “surface” (for example) in your database, this wouldn’t be imported by osm2pgsql.

The tool “osm2pgrouting” works well with creating a routing topology, but it’s not usefull for the problem aforementioned. “osmosis” is another tool for importing data into a PostgreSQL database. But it creates a table structure that is very disastrous because it creates one row for each attribute that belongs to a geometry. So, if your geometry has 5 attributes, there would be 5 rows with the structure: ID, Attribute. If you have a big amount of data, you will assert that this would be very uncomfortable.

Here are some new java programs written by myself, that make it very easy to import data from OSM-Files into your PostgreSQL databases:

• nodes2postgis.jar
• lines2postgis.jar
• latlon2google.jar

The use of the programs is as follows:

For nodes2postgis.jar:

java -jar nodes2postgis.jar map.osm

For lines2postgis.jar:

java -jar lines2postgis.jar map.osm

For latlon2google.jar:

java -jar latlon2google.jar yourTablename

The result of running those java-programms are .sql scripts that can be easily loaded in the SQL-Performer in PGAdmin III or even be executed on command-line as ususal.

Note

The program “latlon2google” converts the data in the declared table from geographical reference system into the google projection.