Safe Software announced that it is adding support for OpenStreetMap format data to their FME product line.  Safe Software makes the leading spatial ETL (extract, transform and load) software on the market.  It’s also the toolkit upon which the ESRI Data Interoperability extensions are based.  It’s exciting to see that Safe will support reading OSM-formatted data.  This will make it a lot easier to use the planet file to generate new data sets.  We recently had a need for a higher resolution country boundary layer than we could get from many of the default sources.  The OSM country boundaries would be ideal, but it’s not necessarily straightforward to extract just that bit and convert it to a shapefile.  Something like FME would make that a lot easier.

Along those same lines, I’d love to see more support for the OpenStreetMap API in other commercial software as well.  While JOSM, Merkaartor and Potlatch are all adequate ways to edit the OSM database, they don’t have many of the editing features of ArcMap.  I’d do more OSM editing if ArcMap supported it as a data source.

It would also be cool to be able to use the OSM basemap as an ArcGIS Online cached map set.  The OSM servers themselves aren’t stable enough (in my experience) to support production applications, but with ESRI adding several new base map source including third party data from Microsoft Virtual Earth and Delorme, I think this would be a good data set that wouldn’t cost much to add and would give a nice basemap that, in many parts of the world, is superior to what TeleAtlas and Navteq can offer.

OpenStreetMap for U-Penn Campus