Open Street Map

OpenStreetMap

Much of the world does not follow the US model of freely providing government created map data. Data may only be available at great cost, or in many countries is not available for security reasons. The rise of cheap and ubiquitous GPS in cell phones, and abundant satellite imagery, means that individuals can create and share map data. Openstreetmap.org serves this function, and is an international effort. They have a web mapping site, and you can download their data.

Openstreet map coverage varies, depending on the whims of whomever did the digitization.

Street classification can abruptly change. Because the program attempts to select the level of roads to show based on the map scale, at some scales the roads can appear discontinuous because the classification changes.
The coverage of buildings also varies; at times one side of a street has been digitized, and the opposite side has not.

In most cases your choices might well to be using Openstreetmap, or nothing, but you must evaluate the map and decide which layers are usable for a particular region.

The US State Department has worked with OpenStreetMap for humanitarian relief efforts to crowd source mapping after a disaster.

Open Street Map has free streets, waterways, railroads, and other layers in shapefile format (and other formats), worldwide.

OpenStreetMap is a free editable map of the whole world. It is made by people like you. It is crowd sourced, or open source, and is similar to Wikipedia.

Data viewer (online)

Export from this map in OSM format, and then convert to a shapefile
Data Manipulation, Resample, OGR DXF/GPX/OSM to shapefile

Download sites:

Best choice: http://download.bbbike.org/osm/ --get city already created, or define polygon
Other choices:
- http://www.geofabrik.de/data/download.html --get country or state, but limited shapefiles
- https://mapzen.com/data/metro-extracts/
  - Datasets split by geometry type: lines, points, or polygons
  - Datasets grouped into individual layers by OpenStreetMap tags: some addresses, but not usable in those tested

Available coverage varies.

Baghdad, Iraq with color coding by the attribute. This is not smart; all lines are the same width, and colors are in alphabetical order for the category names.

OSM data in Normandy, displayed with rules in a database (OSM_RULES.dbf, present in main MICRODEM directory).

This is a smart display, with the importance of the roads indicated by:

Line segment width.
Color. Bright red is used for the largest roads, and smaller roads get increasingly less obvious colors.

OpenStreetMap Features (web wiki)

Using OpenStreetMap in MICRODEM

Last Revision 1/17/2018