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Everything you wanted to know about OSM waterways

29.07.2015 | Frederik Ramm

A new, world-wide water and waterway debug layer is live at the OSM Inspector web site. We’ve done away with the old VMAP0 river reference, and extended coverage from Europe-only to the whole planet.

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There’s tons of new features – for example, OSMI will detect when a river changes its name, or starts out of nowhere (or ends in something that is not another body of water).

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Rivers without names are highlighted, as are directional problems where two parts of a river flow towards, or away from, the same point.

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The software backing these new layers has been written in C++ (using Jochen Topf’s excellent Osmium library) by Geofabrik intern Nathanael Lang. It is Free Software, and can be run in a standalone fashion to convert an OSM .pbf file into a SQLite database if you’d like to run your own analyses. Fork it, or report issues, on GitHub!