OSM Country import - missing border-near lakes, rivers

Question

I'm importing a country (e.g Switzerland) from the cloudmade OSM branch and I'm failing to get the bordercrossing lakes on display. The same issue came up, when I tried to import the geofabrik .dpf branch this morning.

Somehow it makes sense and I don't think it's a bug, but I struggle to get the border crossing stuff to work. How to solve this issue without importing the european-western fileset?

Thanks! Martin

Answer 1

It depends on how the extract was made. Sometimes the big lakes are represented through a collection of OSM ways and if one or more ways are not within the bounding polygon, they get excluded and you don't get a full lake geometry.

I know I had some problems with Geofabrik's extracts for certain countries, since they used some imprecise border polygons to cut out the data for the country. I don't know how Cloudmade does it, maybe you should contact them and ask.

Alternatively you could run osmosis on the west Europe extract using your own polygon for Switzerland (or even just a rectangular box).

Answer 2

I had the exact same problem with switzerland OSM extract on GeoFabrik and CloudMade...

Get yourself an european extract and use osmosis like this :

osmosis --read-pbf europe.osm.pbf --tf accept-relations natural=water --used-way --used-node --write-xml water.osm