FME loves OSM

Michael Weisman writes on the FME Blog:

It’s true. Getting data into OpenStreetMap can, at times, be difficult.

Now don’t get me wrong, there are some great applications out there
for pulling data off your GPS, or tracing Yahoo imagery or adding your
favourite coffee shop as a POI from your iPhone. But, what if your
organization has building footprints in Darwin Glacier Lambert
Conformal 2000 for an entire city in Oracle Spatial and you want to
put that data into OSM?

I have written in the past about using data from OpenStreetMap in your
FME workspaces as a data source, and so I was happy when we recently
added a very early stage writer to compliment the reader. So what does
this new OSM writer mean? Well, if you’ve got some data you would like
to share with the OSM community, you can write it to OSM XML just like
you could with any other format supported by FME. If you want to load
your city’s public data into OSM you can use FME to create OSM XML
from that data. (Note, make sure the license of data you don’t own
allows this, just because it’s public doesn’t mean it can legally be
loaded into OSM. Read and understand the terms and conditions)

To use this writer you will need to be running an FME 2011 beta. It is
still in a somewhat early stage of development, but will improve as
time goes on, and become easier to use.

So if you use OSM data, and you have something to share, why not give
back to the community by loading it into OSM? Download an FME 2011
beta and let us know what you think. If you’re not a current FME
customer, feel free to sign up for our evaluation program for a 14 day
trial. Once you get your trial license, you can download the beta and
be up and running with our OSM writer. We’re always open to comments
and suggestions!

Now a little birdie pointed us to this blog from the talk-ca list. A
tip of the hat to Daniel Bégin for bringing this good news to our
attention.

It’s nice to feel the love for OSM from proprietary software vendors as well.

I wonder if either Daniel, or Michael would care to confirm a rumour
regarding the motivation to add this writer to FME? or should I just
start that rumour here?

Thank you, gentlemen.

P.S. The author denies the suggestion that existing OSM editing tools
are anything less than perfect.