Working with OpenStreetMap in Python

How to easily acquire, manipulate, and process OpenStreetMap data for your next geospatial data science project

Juan Nathaniel
Level Up Coding
Published in
5 min readSep 14, 2021

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OpenStreetMap (OSM) is an open-source database that allows virtually anyone to edit the underlying geospatial dataset. It can be a reliable source of data, especially since it is continually updated and validated by thousands of volunteers around the world. You can choose to download any OSM dataset on your own, but it will be time consuming and difficult. Not to mention the hassle of having to move back and forth between the data source and your development environment. With OSMnx Python library, however, you can acquire and process OSM dataset directly from your Notebook!

Photo by Andrew Stutesman on Unsplash

In this tutorial, we will be using OSMnx to perform OSM tasks that are otherwise inaccessible outside of our Python environment.

OSMnx is a Python package that lets you download spatial geometries and model, project, visualize, and analyze street networks and other spatial data from OpenStreetMap’s API.

Table of Content
1. Setup
2. Point-of-Interests (POIs)
3. Street
4. Building

Without further ado, let’s begin!

Setup

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Engineering @ Columbia University | Documenting and sharing my learning journey through AI, programming, and research