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OSM Inspector Christmas Update

19.12.2008 | Jochen Topf

Since the launch of the OSM Inspector (http://tools.geofabrik.de/osmi/) at the end of October many people have used it to improve OSM data. We got lots of great feedback, have fixed many bugs, and added several new views.

In time for christmas we have some presents for OSM Inspector users:

  • OSM Inspector works in IE and Safari now
  • A last update timestamp is shown
  • There is a new ‘info’ button next to the view pulldown that links to the documentation of this view on the wiki
  • There is a link to the OSM data browser directly from the selection
  • Permalinks are shorter in most cases
  • Some smaller bug fixes

In the last months we have added the “Boundaries” view depicting administrative boundaries between countries, districts, etc. Also there is a “Kreisgrenze” view to help German users with tagging local boundaries and an import of boundaries we are planning. Also for German users is the “Strassen NRW” view which shows road data from North Rhine-Westphalia that we received from a government agency.

To celebrate the new Inspector version we added a brand new view today: The “Tagging” view shows basic problems with tags such as misspelled keys and highlights objects tagged as to-do item or with FIXME. Try it out at http://tools.geofabrik.de/osmi/?view=tagging .

We have created a mailing list for OSM Inspector “power users” at http://lists.geofabrik.de/listinfo/osm-inspector . Sign up there if you want to receive early notification of new features, or discuss possible enhancements.

From day one it was possible to look at OSM Inspector layers from WMS clients or download the data through WFS, but we never documented this. We have now added documentation for WMS and WFS access to the wiki
at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OSM_Inspector/WxS . This (semi-official) API allows you to get rendered maps or the raw data from OSM Inspector layers to use in your own applications. Please read
the documentation on the wiki carefully before using this and subscribe to our mailing list to keep abreast of changes if you use this API.