Introduction ¶

The article provides a walkthrough for establishing a live OSM mirror focused on particular geographic regions and feature types. Using Angola’s building data as an example, the tutorial demonstrates how to continuously update a PostGIS database with new OpenStreetMap contributions, enabling offline analysis capabilities.

Architecture Overview ¶

An architectural diagram illustrates the system’s underlying infrastructure. All code is available in the Kartoza GitHub repository (docker-osm).

Implementation Steps ¶

1. Identify the country/region PBF file
2. Optionally create a clip.shp file for the area of interest
3. Optionally create a mappings.yml file
4. Modify the sample project with selected options
5. Start the docker-compose project
6. Connect to PostGIS from QGIS
7. Run queries using dbmanager to create views
8. Use QGIS time manager plugin to animate temporal data

Prerequisites ¶

Users should be familiar with:

• Docker and docker-compose
• GNU make
• YAML file editing
• OSM data fundamentals
• PostGIS usage and QGIS connection protocols
• QGIS and its time manager plugin

Quickstart: Angola Buildings Example ¶

Download docker-osm-examples, navigate to the angola-buildings folder, and execute make deploy. The system initializes the PostGIS database, imports the country PBF file via imposm, and runs osm-enrich to add usernames and timestamps.

Time Series Visualization ¶

Create a PostgreSQL view filtering for complete OSMENRICH records, then apply QGIS’s time manager plugin with monthly intervals. The “Accumulate features” option displays building progression chronologically.

Credits ¶

Development team: Tim Sutton, Etienne Trimaille, Irwan Fathurrahman, and Yarjuna Rohmat. Initial funding provided by Kartoza; subsequent support from WorldBank/GFDRR and DigitalSquare.