Extracting Topology and Geometry Information from OpenStreetMap Data for Digital Maps for Railway Applications

Abstract

Digital maps are used for various applications in railways, such as positioning and map-matching, asset management for maintenance, fleet management or traveller information. While most of these applications still consider official map databases generated within surveying campaigns of land surveying offices or engineering surveying companies, the result of crowd-based mapping of infrastructure known as volunteered geographic information (VGI) becomes more and more interesting. OpenStreetMap (OSM) is probably the biggest and best known VGI approach providing a free and open-source database for geo data worldwide outperforming conventional mapping procedures with regard to the currentness of data and costs. In previous work we presented an approach how OSM data can be used for various railway applications by introducing topic-specific attributes for describing the railway infrastructure in terms of topology, geometry, topography and accuracy. The purpose of this paper is to show that by using simple geometry algorithms, the required railway topology and geometry information can be extracted from the existing OSM data base.